Boehringer Ingelheim reports positive data for hepatitis C drug

Boehringer Ingelheim has announced encouraging new data from STARTVerso, the phase III clinical trial programme evaluating the efficacy of its new hepatitis C therapy faldaprevir.

The STARTVerso programme encompasses several studies and is designed to assess faldaprevir in combination with pegylated interferon and ribavirin in the treatment of genotype-1 hepatitis C across a number of patient groups.

Early results from the trials showed that Boehringer Ingelheim's drug was associated with a shorter time on treatment for 84 percent of treatment-naive patients, with the majority going on to achieve viral cure with no compromise on safety and tolerability.

It was also shown to offer benefits for difficult-to-cure patient populations, such as those with HIV co-infection and advanced liver disease.

Professor Klaus Dugi, senior vice-president for medicine at Boehringer Ingelheim, said: "Faldaprevir is the foundation of our HCV pipeline and we look forward to presenting pivotal Phase III HCVerso data for the treatment of HCV as part of an interferon-free regimen in 2014."

This comes after the firm reported positive phase III data for its chronic obstructive pulmonary disease therapy Striverdi Respimat last month.