Since the launches of Incivek® and Victrelis®, only 4 years ago, about 100,000 patients in our database have moved from being “warehoused” to being treated. The launches of Sovaldi and Olysio® in December 2013 made Incivek and Victrelis obsolete. Recent launches of Gilead’s Harvoni® and AbbVie’s Viekira Pak give health care professionals even more options in treating their HCV patients.
Because these new treatments provide a high cure rate and physicians are quickly adopting these new therapies, the HCV market is undergoing dramatic changes. These changes required AbbVie to search for innovative means of studying the HCV population prior to the launch. The integration of lab results data from Medivo and prescription data from IMS results in an innovative dataset that enables AbbVie to identify health care professionals caring for patients with HCV who are about to start treatment, and also monitor the market share performance of particular agents across patient genotypes.
Integrated lab results data with prescription data is now an important new tool for brand teams across many therapeutic areas. As disease management and personalized medicine increase in importance and highly specific biomarkers become more available, the use and application of this new tool will become a core asset to brand planning teams.
In addition, the findings presented here provide critical insights to forecasters on the dynamics of patients in and out of the “warehouse,” trends of patient being tested, and share of new therapy starts by genotype. These findings help business leaders to make informed decisions regarding the market potential and patient size of the HCV market.