Discussion on critical points for a tailored therapy to cure hepatitis C virus infection

Clin Mol Hepatol. 2019 Jan 23. doi: 10.3350/cmh.2018.0061. [Epub ahead of print]

Discussion on critical points for a tailored therapy to cure hepatitis C virus infection.
Marascio N1, Quirino A1, Barreca GS1, Galati L1, Costa C2, Pisani V2, Mazzitelli M2, Matera G1, Liberto MC1, Focà A1, Torti C2.

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Abstract
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infects around 71 million people worldwide and in 2018 it is still a major health problem. Since 2011, anti-HCV therapy with availability of direct-acting antiviral drugs has revolutionized the clinical response and paved the way to eradication strategies. However, despite the high rate of sustained virological response, treatment failure may occur in a limited percentage of patients, possibly due to resistance-associated substitutions (RASs), either emergent or pre-existent even in minority viral populations. Clearly this problem may impair success of eradication strategies. With this background, several questions marks still exist around HCV treatment, including whether pan-genotypic treatments with complete effectiveness in any clinical conditions really exist outside clinical trials, the actual cost-effectiveness of genotyping testing, and utility of RAS detection in viral quasispecies by next generation sequencing approach. In this review, we describe these critical points by discussing recent literature data and our research experience.

PMID: 30669818 DOI: 10.3350/cmh.2018.0061
Source https://www.e-cmh.org/upload/pdf/cmh-2018-0061.pdf