{"id":51728,"date":"2026-05-29T14:45:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T14:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/51728\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T14:45:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T14:45:10","slug":"gsk-hepatitis-b-drug-a-long-term-opportunity-but-us-bank-holds-back-from-upgrading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/51728\/","title":{"rendered":"GSK hepatitis B drug a long-term opportunity but US bank holds back from upgrading"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"yf-1fy9kyt\">Citi is holding back from recommending <a href=\"https:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/quote\/GSK.l\" data-ylk=\"slk:GSK PLC (LSE:GSK, NYSE:GSK);elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" data-yga=\"{&quot;yLinkElement&quot;:&quot;context_link&quot;,&quot;yModuleName&quot;:&quot;content-canvas&quot;,&quot;yLinkText&quot;:&quot;GSK PLC (LSE&quot;}\" class=\"link \" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">GSK PLC (LSE:GSK, NYSE:GSK)<\/a>\u00a0shares despite a significant clinical breakthrough in hepatitis B treatment, arguing that unanswered commercial questions mean any value from the new drug is unlikely to materialise for shareholders in the near term.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1fy9kyt\">The bank maintains its &#8216;neutral&#8217; rating on GSK after trial results for the company&#8217;s experimental drug bepirovirsen were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1fy9kyt\">The hesitation centres on practical questions that remain unresolved: how the drug will be priced, which countries will be able to access it first, and whether the intensive blood and liver monitoring required during treatment will prove workable in everyday clinical settings outside of a trial environment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1fy9kyt\">The cautious stance comes despite results that Citi itself describes as clinically meaningful.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1fy9kyt\">Bepirovirsen works by silencing the genetic instructions the hepatitis B virus uses to replicate inside the body, an approach known as an antisense oligonucleotide (ASO).<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1fy9kyt\">Current treatments keep the virus under control but rarely eliminate it, meaning most patients must take medication every day for the rest of their lives, with fewer than 1% ever achieving what doctors call a functional cure, where the virus is suppressed to undetectable levels without ongoing treatment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1fy9kyt\">Trial results showed bepirovirsen curing 19% of a broad group of hepatitis B patients and 26% of those with lower levels of the virus in their blood, compared with zero cures in the group receiving standard treatment alone.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1fy9kyt\">Hepatitis B is a chronic liver infection affecting around 300 million people worldwide, which can lead to liver failure and cancer if left uncontrolled.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1fy9kyt\">Citi models peak annual sales of \u00a31.6 billion for the drug, broadly in line with market consensus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Citi is holding back from recommending GSK PLC (LSE:GSK, NYSE:GSK)\u00a0shares despite a significant clinical breakthrough in hepatitis B&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[20784],"tags":[13099,25718,20785,21214,24032,25720,25719,25717],"class_list":["post-51728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-gsk","tag-citi","tag-experimental-drug","tag-gsk","tag-gsk-plc","tag-hepatitis-b","tag-long-term-opportunity","tag-trial-results","tag-us-bank"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116658406831971283","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}