Vertex, Merck hepatitis drugs work in HIV patients

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Rival hepatitis C drugs from Merck & Co Inc and Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc are effective in patients also infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to data released on Tuesday.

The Vertex drug had the more impressive results, the data showed.

The results from midstage trials follow notification last month from U.S. regulators and Merck that use of the company's Victrelis drug in such "co-infected" patients could lessen the effectiveness of some medicines used to treat patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.

Those findings involved "boosted" HIV protease inhibitors.

Both Victrelis, also known as boceprevir, and Vertex's Incivek, or telaprevir, are protease inhibitors designed to block an enzyme that the hepatitis C virus requires to replicate.

Since key HIV drugs are also protease inhibitors, which use the same pathway as the new hepatitis C drugs, there is a potential for drug interaction, said Dr. Douglas Dietrich, professor of medicine at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine and lead investigator on the Incivek trial.

He said 74 percent of trial patients treated with Incivek followed by the standard regimen of interferon and ribavirin were free of the hepatitis C virus, or HCV, 12 weeks after ending treatment, compared with 45 percent of patients given interferon and ribavirin alone.

There were no instances of a rebound of HIV for patients in the Incivek trial. Side effects seen more frequently with the drug were itching, headache, nausea, rash, fever and depression. No cases of severe rash were reported.

Merck's Phase II trial found that 60.7 percent of patients treated with Victrelis and the standard hepatitis C therapy were free of HCV 12 weeks after treatment, compared with 26.5 percent of patients treated only with interferon and ribavirin.

Three patients on Victrelis and four in the control group had an increase in HIV.

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Vertex, Merck hepatitis drugs work in HIV patients