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Start Strong, Finish Strong

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), combination therapies that include PEGINTRON® have achieved the highest response rates in treatment of chronic hepatitis C. PEGINTRON® is better than standard, non-pegylated interferon at clearing the virus from your body.

And PEGINTRON® comes to you from a trusted leader in the field, with unequalled experience in hepatitis C treatment and a significant history of U.S. prescriptions.

Starting strong on PEGINTRON® means that, after 4 weeks of treatment, it's possible that much less virus is present in your body. Such a rapid viral response (RVR) helps predict success later on. The faster the virus level in your body decreases on its way to an undetectable level, the more likely you are to sustain a viral response.1 Starting strong helps you finish strong.

In a clinical trial, 59.2% of patients responded to their treatment with weight-based PEGINTRON® combination therapy, showing no signs of HCV after 48 weeks, at the end of their treatment. When tested six months later, 44.2% of all patients who received weight-based PEGINTRON® combination therapy achieved Sustained Viral Response (SVR), meaning no hepatitis C virus was found in their blood at that time. This reflects a low relapse rate of 15.3% compared to 19% among those who received a fixed dose.2

One reason that the PEGINTRON® molecule works so well to eliminate hepatitis C from your body is because the pegylation of the interferon increases the amount of time the interferon remains in the body by increasing the size of the interferon molecule. Increasing molecule size slows the absorption, but prolongs the half-life, and decreases the rate of interferon clearance. This increases the duration of biological activity of pegylated interferon over nonpegylated interferon3 and offers you the benefit of less frequent administration.

1 Lee, SS, Abdo, AA. Predicting antiviral treatment response in chronic hepatitis C: how accurate and how soon? Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (2003) 51, 487-491. Available online at http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/.... Accessed 3/12/2008.

2 Ira M. Jacobson IM, Brown Jr. RS, Freilich B. et al. Peginterferon alfa-2b and Weight-Based or Flat-Dose Ribavirin in Chronic Hepatitis C Patients: A Randomized Trial. Hepatology. October, 2007. 46(4): 971-981. Available at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/116323744/PDFSTART. Accessed February 3, 2009

3 Baker DE. Pegylated Interferon Plus Ribavirin for the Treatment of Chronic Hepatitis C. Reviews in Gastroenterological Disorders Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 2003. Available online at http://www.medreviews.com. Abstract available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.... Accessed 3/19/2008.