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Genotyping hepatitis C patients improves prediction of treatment response

September 13th, 2011

In this week's PLoS Medicine, David Booth of the University of Sydney, Australia and colleagues show that genotyping hepatitis C patients for the IL28B, HLA-C and KIR genes substantially improves doctors' ability to predict whether or not patients will respond to antiviral treatment.

The results of the study suggest that an interaction between IL28B, HLA-C and KIRs provides a mechanism for hepatitis C viral control and highlight new insights into how the drug combination of pegylated interferon alpha and ribavirin clears hepatitis C virus infections, findings that may lead to improved therapies in the future. The findings have yet to be confirmed in patients of non-European descent.

More information:
Suppiah V, Gaudieri S, Armstrong NJ, O'Connor KS, Berg T, et al. (2011) IL28B, HLA-C, and KIR Variants Additively Predict Response to Therapy in Chronic Hepatitis C Virus Infection in a European Cohort: A Cross-Sectional Study. PLoS Med 8(9): e1001092. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001092

Provided by Public Library of Science

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