Liver Disease - How To Beat Hepatitis C With These Alternative Therapies
Posted in Health on 11/11/2008 12:44 pm by James KellyNew Drugs for Dealing with Hepatitis C cirrhosis and liver disease
Data from today’s medical meeting shows that better than 60% of patients with a resistant strain of hepatitis C treated with an experimental drug from Vertex Pharmaceuticals were cured.
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Times Health Guide: Hepatitis C
The highest cure rate reported so far for the condition was spotlighted when Wall Street and doctors awaited the results, and the treatment worked half the time.
But Vertex might have to share a bit of the limelight with Romark Laboratories, a tiny privately held company that already sells a drug called Alinia that is used to treat diarrhea caused by certain parasites but that suddenly is emerging as a potential treatment for hepatitis C.
In a presentation that has escaped the attention of Wall Street, though it is to be made at the same meeting, researchers are to report that Alinia helped cure as many as 79 percent of hepatitis C patients, although they had a form of the virus that might be slightly easier to treat than the type Vertex took on.
“Out of the right field, here comes the skepticism”, said Dr. Emmet B. Keeffe, chief of hepatology at Stanford, who is a consultant to Romark. Proper medical treatment is very essential for early cure of any of your diseases. But the Doctor who is treating you should be well qualified and intelligent enough to do proper diagnosis and cure. It is pretty exciting when you overcome your own initial skepticism, said Keeffe.”
Both developments, experts said, will need to be followed up by larger trials. Patients will feel that the progress being made is one of the most important factors. At least three million Americans are thought to be infected with the hepatitis C virus, and the number of cases of liver cirrhosis and liver cancer caused by the virus is rising.
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The current care, a composite of alpha interferon and ribavirin, may lead to flu-like symptoms, anemia and depression The treatment for type 1 hepatitis C, the hard-to-treat form that accounts for 70 percent of the cases in the United States, takes nearly a year.
So the hunt for new drugs has been intense, and Vertex, a publicly traded company based in Cambridge, Mass., is widely acknowledged as the front-runner. In pill form it is labelled telaprevir or VX-950, and it works by interfering with a viral enzyme. Most AIDS drugs work in this fashion, but this is a completely new approach to treat hepatitis C.
New information expected to be presented at the forthcoming meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases which is held in Boston, will demonstrate evidence that telaprevir, which has previously been shown to decrease virus levels in the bloodstream, could cure many patients.
In a midstage trial in the United States of 250 previously untreated patients, 61 percent of the people who received telaprevir in addition to the two standard drugs had no detectable virus in their blood 24 weeks after the end of the treatment, a Vertex executive said. Physicians believe that an effective recovery.
In a European trial of 323 patients, about 65 percent of those who got the three-drug combination had no detectable virus 12 weeks after the end of treatment.
The typical cure rate for standard drugs alone is now 40 to 50 percent for type 1 hepatitis C, but using these two new drugs have actually gotten higher results. Perhaps as significant, doctors said, the treatment took 24 weeks instead of the usual 48. That means patients would have to endure the side effects of interferon and ribavirin for a shorter time.
“These are spectacular acheivements’, exclaimed Physician M.Ira At the meeting, the consultant for Vertex, Jacobson of Weill Cornell Medical College, will be presenting the outcome of the American trial.
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Wall Street was expecting these figures so it wasn’t a big surprise. And many more people getting the three drugs stopped treatment because of side effects than those getting the standard therapy. What is not available are the standard therapy trial cure rates.
The Romark data come from a study in Egypt of only 96 previously untreated patients. Alinia (medical name: nitazoxanide) had been tested for treatment on parasites prior.
In just 12 weeks after finishing their care of Alinia and two other standard drugs, 79 percent no longer had the virus. That in comparison with 43% within a control champion, which receives the usual treatment. While undergoing the normal 48 week treatment, the patients took the two standard drugs durning a 36 week period.
In the United States, type 4 hepatitis C is rare, but these patients were diagnosed with it. Some experts said type 4 was slightly easier to treat than type 1. Romark is currently based in Tampa in Florida., and has about $20 million in annual revenue, has begun a trial in the United States.
The drug’s effectiveness against hepatitis C was discovered almost by accident. Liver Disease,Cirrhosis,Hepatitis C,HCV
Doctor Alinia is already on market and appear to have some side effects.Keffe is reseaching how the Romark drug works and is saying that some doctors might prescribe Alinia off label to treat hepatitis C. It costs about $30 a day for the two pills needed. Doctors can prescribe medicines for uses not approved by the FDA, but it is illegal for drug manufacturers to market them for off-label uses before they approved for such uses.
“We’re all looking for better therapy for our patients, and this looks like a very benign thing to do,” MD. Keeffe said.
Proper medical treatment is very essential for early cure of any of your diseases. But the Doctor who is treating you should be well qualified and intelligent enough to do proper diagnosis and cure. Doing so would be quite premature according to Jacobson out of Cornell.