Bank Of America Comments On Vertex Pharmaceuticals FDA Approvals

According to Bank of America, Vertex Pharmaceuticals VRTX will capture the full value of Incivek therapy in 1 quarter vs 3 quarters for MRK, so the dollar market share for VRTX with our assumptions is significantly higher at 70-80%. Bank of America said that with the recent FDA approvals of two new directly competitive drugs for the treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV), it expects a high degree of investor scrutiny on the prescriptions during the launch period as a metric for market share and launch success. “We have developed an HCV prescription tracker and a key finding is that the apparent market share for MRK's Victrelis should be much larger in total prescriptions (TRx), relative to VRTX's Incivek (especially over time), even under the current marketplace assumption that Incivek will have greater patient share. Thus, we recommend investors use new prescriptions (NRx) as a better gauge for market share than TRx, although NRx is still imperfect because some re-fills will show as NRx. Our new model is now linked to TRx and we assume Street models will follow.” Vertex Pharmaceuticals closed yesterday at $55.81.