Wall Street likes nothing better than to start the week off with a bang, and pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE: MRK) rang the bell Monday by spending $3.85 billion to buy small cap biotech company Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: IDNX). The company made the deal to bolster its arsenal in the battle for new hepatitis C treatments, which is proving to be a huge money maker as the disease is on the rise.

Merck paid a huge 240% premium to the company’s closing price on Friday, and shareholders must have done the victory formation big on Monday. Idenix is one of a number of companies trying to design and formulate drugs that would be part of all-oral cocktail regimens for hepatitis C, which are replacing interferon-based therapies.

The question we wanted to answer was what other companies are in the process of working on new therapies for the disease that may also be targets? We scoured our Wall Street research looking for the companies working on new drugs, and came up with four names, some large and some small. All may be in play after Merck’s stunning purchase.

Here are the four top names we found that all have hepatitis C drugs in their current pipelines at one stage or another.

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BioCryst Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: BCRX) designs, optimizes and develops small molecule pharmaceuticals that block key enzymes involved in the pathogenesis of diseases. The company currently has a polymerase inhibitor in preclinical evaluations that may be instrumental in a new treatment.

While far away from anything final, BioCryst also has multiple pipeline products that could prove interesting to a major pharmaceutical. The Thomson/First Call price target for the stock is $17. BioCryst closed Monday at $11.30 a share.

Dynavax Technologies Corp.‘s (NASDAQ: DVAX) top drug Heplisav, a hepatitis B vaccine, may make for a very solid play. The vaccine has been rejected twice by the FDA, but a third look may be the charm. The company issued a secondary offering last fall to raise $125 million to fund HBV-23, a massive phase 3 trial consisting of 8,000 patients. If approved, Heplisav could generate peak sales of $775 million and compete directly against Engerix-B and Merck’s Recombivax HB.

At the current price, there would seem to be limited downside to Dynavax stock, although it has considerable upside potential on any positive updates about Heplisav. The consensus price target for the stock is $4.50. Dynavax closed Monday at $1.49.

Intermune Inc. (NASDAQ: ITMN) is expected to be ramping up international sales of Esbriet. The drug was developed for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The key for the company will be FDA approval for sales here. A randomized, Phase 3 trial (the ASCEND study) is currently underway in the United States and recent trial data was very positive.

Intermune is also working with Roche on a protease inhibitor that is already in Phase 2 studies for the treatment of hepatitis C. The consensus price target is $43.56. Intermune closed Monday at $41.67.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: VRTX) is big cap biotech leader that got on the biotechnology map with its blockbuster hepatitis C drug. The company looks poised to get revenue growing again with its cystic fibrosis franchise. It already has one drug approved, but Kalydeco by itself is only appropriate for about 4% of cystic fibrosis patients.

While Vertex would be a huge purchase for anybody as the company has a $17.6 billion market cap, stranger things have happened and blockbuster purchases are not out of the question. The consensus price target is $90.45. Vertex closed Monday at $74.61.

We have often written about the need for big pharmaceutical companies to replace revenue and profit growth when some of their top-selling drugs come off patent. One way is through acquisitions and mergers, and one thing is for sure, the question is not if, but when the next big acquisition will be made.

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