Its pill, being sold under the brand name Incivek (pronounced inn-see-veck), is expected to quickly become the biggest selling drug from a Massachusetts company in nearly a decade, with annual sales projected to hit $2 billion within three years. But rather than drum up consumer interest in the product itself, Vertex is conducting a so-called unbranded campaign that doesn’t mention Incivek. The idea, company officials say, is to let more people know about hepatitis C.
Educating the public about the disease also is a priority for pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., which is selling a hepatitis C drug to compete with Vertex’s and has enlisted legendary rocker Gregg Allman for a similar awareness campaign.
The two companies are promoting information about the illness over their brand-name medicines — at least for now — because many of the 3.2 million Americans believed to carry the virus don’t realize they are infected, according to numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
“Three quarters of the people don’t know they have the disease, and most of the people who know don’t get treated,’’ said Pamela Stephenson, Vertex’s vice president for marketing excellence.
“People out there are searching for information. They can be scared. They can be alone,’’ Stephenson said. “At the core of what we’re trying to do is to find people who have hepatitis C and help them lead a better life.’’
Untreated, hepatitis C can eventually cause cancer or liver scarring, and about 10,000 people die from the disease every year in the United States. Many of those at risk are baby boomers who contracted the virus through intravenous drug use or blood transfusions in the 1960s or 1970s, before the blood supply was safeguarded, and have lived for decades without symptoms.
