Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C infects an estimated 170 mn people worldwide and 4 mn in the US. In the US alone, there are 10 000 to 20 000 deaths per year due to hepatitis C. Persons infected with the hepatitis C virus can live with the infection for many years without experiencing any serious symptoms. In most cases, however, the illness manifests itself at some point with severe symptoms such as liver cancer or cirrhosis. Since most hepatitis C infections in the Western world occurred between 1960 and 1990, before there were effective means of diagnosis and prevention, it can be assumed that the mortality rate will increase in the coming years. The current standard of care is combination therapy with pegylated interferon (Roche’s Pegasys and Schering-Plough’s PEG-Intron) and Ribavirin for 48 weeks. This treatment regimen is cumbersome as it involves weekly injections and the pegylated interferons cause flu-like symptoms and other side effects that are often disabling. Moreover, only 40% to 50% of patients who endure the therapy are able to eradicate the virus. The only other alternative for patients who progress and do not respond to pegylated Interferon/Ribavirin treatment is a liver transplant. Novel antivirals in clinical development are oral and have the potential to substantially increase the cure rate while cutting the duration of pegylated Interferon/Ribavirin therapy in half, thereby offering a tremendous advance for this disease.
