AbbVie beats Street, touches on HCV pricing

AbbVie Inc. (NYSE:ABBV) reported 1Q14 earnings that beat the Street on Friday and indicated that it may not price its all-oral HCV regimen below competing HCV therapies. In response to a question about how "competitive one needs to be on pricing a duopoly" in HCV, Chairman and CEO Richard Gonzalez said AbbVie is "not going to talk specifically about how we're going to deal with pricing," but said the company's HCV regimen "stand[s] up quite nicely to what the market wants and certainly that will be the driver of how we tried to educate the market and market the product." The comments were made on a conference call to discuss AbbVie's earnings.

On Tuesday, the company submitted an NDA to FDA for its all-oral regimen comprising ABT-450 plus the company's Norvir ritonavir, ABT-267 and ABT-333 with and without ribavirin to treat HCV genotype 1 infection (see BioCentury Extra, April 22). ...