The pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. Inc. announced Monday that it will buy Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc. for $3.85 million.
Merck said it is looking to combine the best drugs from both companies to make a more effective cure for hepatitis C, according to Reuters.
Roger Perlmutter, research chief for Merck, said in an interview that the deal may result in a triple therapy that could cure patients of all genotypes, or strains, of the virus in four to six weeks.
"An ideal therapy means something that works in every hepatitis C-infected patient, irrespective of which genotype," Perlmutter said. "Our goal is to cure everyone quickly using an oral regimen."
The company said it will pay Idenix $24.50 per share in cash, which is over triple Idenix's closing level on June 6 of $7.23, Bloomberg reported.
Merck, the second-biggest drugmaker in the U.S., said in April that in a mid-stage study, its hepatitis C pill, which is taken once a day and combines two drugs, stopped the virus in 98 percent of newly treated patients. Few major side effects resulted from the treatment.
"We've been talking with Idenix for a long time, and have a long history in this field," Perlmutter said.
Drugmakers are currently trying to compete with Gilead Sciences Inc. and its treatment called Sovaldi. The $84,000 drug was approved in December and, in its first few months on the market, made $2.3 billion in sales. Sovaldi cures 90 percent of patients in eight weeks of treatment, and has received a lot of criticism from government officials over its cost, Reuters reported.
Idenix is developing three drugs for hepatitis C treatment, one of which, called IDX21437, is in early-stage trials and is a nucleotide inhibitor (nuc) that blocks a protein that the virus needs to replicate, making it similar to Sovaldi. Merck is looking to combine IDX21437 with its two high profile treatments MK-5172, a protease inhibitor, and MK-8742, a so-called NS5A inhibitor. Both of these experimental oral treatments received a "breakthrough therapy" designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Hepatitis C affects an estimated 170 million people around the world, Bloomberg reported.
"What we would like to do, insofar as it is possible, is cure them all," Perlmutter said.