Welcome to HCV Advocate’s hepatitis blog. The intent of this blog is to keep our website audience up-to-date on information about hepatitis and to answer some of our web site and training audience questions. People are encouraged to submit questions and post comments.

For more information on how to use this blog and search the HCV drug pipeline click here; for more information on HCV clinical trials click here

Be sure to check out our other blog: Hepatitis & Tattoos

Alan Franciscus
Editor-in-Chief
HCV Advocate
HBV Advocate

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

New Ways to Study HCV, Genotypes 3 and 4

Researchers can now study replication of Hepatitis C virus genotypes 3 and 4 in cultured cells, described in 2 articles in the January issue of Gastroenterology. These new tools will improve our understanding of how they cause liver disease, and could lead to new treatments.

HCV leads to chronic infection and advanced liver diseases in most infected adults. It is a positive-strand RNA virus that replicates its genome with the help of an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase.

Read more
Posted by at
Labels:

1 comment:

  1. This is great news for people with HCV genotype 3 and 4. As mentioned in the article, many current HCV direct acting antivirals do not work as well in some genotypes. This discovery will mean that more drugs can be tested that will be more specific to treat HCV genotype 3 and 4. It will also be very interesting if the discovery of the genotype 3 replication model leads to an understanding of why people with HCV genotype 3 develop steatosis (fatty liver) independent of other factors such as high fat food and lack of exercise. HCV genotype 3 is the only other genotype that is believed to directly cause fatty liver disease.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)