AbbVie oral hep C drugs cure 96 percent in late stage trial

[riky]

AbbVie oral hep C drugs cure 96 percent in late stage trial

AbbVie Inc's all-oral hepatitis C therapy cured 96 percent of difficult-to-treat patients in a late-stage clinical trial after 12 weeks, keeping the company well placed in a highly competitive race to deliver new treatments for the serious liver disease. The study of 394 patients with the most common Genotype 1 version of the virus tested the AbbVie regimen in people who had failed to be cured by the older standard treatments of pegylated interferon and ribavirin. In results issued by AbbVie on Tuesday, nearly half of those in the Phase III trial dubbed Sapphire-II were prior null responders - a particularly difficult to treat group whose virus had no response to treatment with the older drugs. The impressive cure rate after just 12 weeks of therapy mirrors the results seen last month in another late stage study that tested the all oral AbbVie regimen in potentially less challenging patients who had received no prior treatment for their hepatitis C. Two percent of patients in the Sapphire-II trial experienced relapse or virologic breakthrough in which the virus rebounds after initially responding to treatment, while the discontinuation rate due to side effects was 1 percent.

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