Shares in Vertex Pharmaceuticals climbed as much as 23 percent Thursday after IMS Health announced that it was revising estimates of the number of prescriptions written in late September for the recently launched drug Incivek (telaprevir). IMS noted that the figures it had released for September had been adjusted based on estimates to account for missing data and it will now reassess with actual sales of the hepatitis C therapy.
"A significant portion of Incivek mail data was not reported to IMS beginning with data week ending [September 23] through data week ending [September 30]," IMS said, adding that it expects to adjust last month's numbers with real sales by October 14. Incivek was approved by the FDA in May and by European regulators last month, where it is marketed as Incivo with partner Johnson & Johnson.
ISI Group analyst Mark Schoenebaum remarked that IMS may have underestimated prescriptions for Incivek as data had suggested sales had stopped growing last month. As such, he noted that "people are now thinking that maybe the trends weren't quite as flat as everybody was thinking."
Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Geoffrey Porges said that in his conversations with Vertex, the company indicated that the revised IMS data "seems likely to align…with their internal impressions of the market," which he said was that of continued solid growth. He added that shares in Vertex had dropped since September 21 "largely on the basis of fears about these script trends, so it makes sense that they will retrace a lot of that loss now."