Glaxo says Cervarix can win half market

By Ben Hirschler and Sam Cage

NEW YORK (Reuters) - GlaxoSmithKline Plc's cervical cancer vaccine Cervarix should eventually secure a 50 percent market share, despite being second to market, the group's chief executive said on Monday.

Jean-Pierre Garnier also told the Reuters Health Summit in New York that he saw no reason to discount Cervarix to Merck & Co Inc's Gardasil, which was first to launch, given the "humungous" size of the potential market.

"One day you'll wake up and you'll see that basically both vaccines are kind of 50-50 -- that's what I'd expect the medium term is going to show," he said in a phone interview.

Garnier said he saw "no point" in discounting Cervarix prices to Gardasil to boost sales.

Cervarix is already available in Europe but is still pending approval in the United States, where Gardasil is well established, helping to put it on course for $1 billion-a-year sales.

"Cervarix could be one of the biggest products ever, all categories, simply because of the fact that it addresses a need of close to half of the population. You don't get that chance too often," Garnier said.

Both Cervarix and Gardasil protect against cancer-causing strains of the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV) and are designed to be given to girls and young women.

Although similar, the two vaccines are not identical. Gardasil targets four strains of HPV -- two responsible for cervical cancer and two causing the less serious condition of genital warts.  Continued...