Gilead Racks Up Quarterly Record

Gilead (NASDAQ: GILD) announced total revenues for 3Q07 of $1.06B, up 41% percent compared to total revenues of $748.7MM for 3Q06, along with record product sales of $962MM, up 44% over 3Q06! An amazing 90-day run, but what I am most interested in is how is Letaris® (ambrisentan) faring?

Now don’t quote me here because I am unable to recall/validate my sources (and I feel awful about that) but from what I have heard that with a field sales team focusing on large PAH centers Letairis® did about $6MM in its first quarter of sales and a forecast of ~$15MM for '07. The parity pricing with rival Actelion Pharma's Tracleer® (~40K/yr) has aided with reimbursement by Medicaid in 49 states, a strong label, and 9 of the top 20 managed care plans have given approval; combine these elements and Letairis should have a potent 2008 and aid a lot of people in the process. After perusing some of the PAH message boards this appears to be the tone…

"it [Letairis®] is doing wonders. I didn’t feel that way with Ventavis like many said I would but when I added Letairis I feel great. I am all over the house cleaning and playing with my kids and walking to the stores even Walmart. I'll let you know how my six minute walk and echo or rhc come out because I am doing so well they want to check those lovely numbers because that’s what counts. I hope it works for you as well as its doing for me at this point. I am a class 3 but by me just walking 2 minutes my sats didn’t drop and I wasn’t out of breath, he says its possible I'm a class 2 which would be great."

"It is amazing how much better I feel. Some days I feel almost normal. Less side effects for me than the Tracleer."

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