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Within the next few years, several pipeline hepatitis C (HCV) drugs are expected to be approved in the United States, ensuring that even the most difficult-to-treat patients will soon be able to be cured, according to experts interviewed at The Liver Meeting in Boston.
“Very few patients are being warehoused because there are only a few very niche special populations left,” noted Robert Brown, M.D., M.P.H., Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, who summarized data presented at the meeting’s Hepatitis Debrief.
“There are three new regimens that we are learning about at this meeting … that will address the unmet need that remains,” said Paul Pockros, M.D., director of the Liver Disease Center Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. Those include new regimens from Gilead, AbbVie and Merck, which will be able to cure patients who previously failed treatment, patients with patients with renal failure and genotype 3 patients with cirrhosis.
“Probably the biggest group of patients to think about in the future is the treatment failure group,” said Brown. Today, very few patients fail treatment, but that could change as more and more patients are treated and as treatment duration shortens for some patients, he explained.
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