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posted by
CoolHand
on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:46PM
from the trial-wonders-that-we-never-see-in-real-life dept.
from the trial-wonders-that-we-never-see-in-real-life dept.
SBS Australia reports that a dual therapy of antiviral drug and anti-cancer drugs was 100 percent successful in eliminating the hepatitis B virus (HBV) infections in pre-clinical animal trials. The combination treatment targets the cell signalling pathways that the hepatitis B virus uses to keep host liver cells alive.
Researcher Marc Pellegrini said "We are hopeful these promising results will be as successful in human clinical trials, which are currently underway in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide,"
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/04/21/new-treatment-promising-hep-b
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Australian Scientists Cure Hepatitis B in Animal Trials
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(Score: 2) by Joe on Saturday May 02 2015, @02:52AM
I don't know how much Entecavir costs.
Animal studies aren't enough to know if this will work in people, so we'll have to wait to see if it can be used as a cure. Even if the treatment doesn't directly result in the death of all the infected cells, the immune system may be able to recognize and kill the cells or the cells will eventually die on their own.
HSV also doesn't have a reverse transcriptase, so Entecavir would be ineffective as a treatment. A cure for HSV will not be easy to come by since the virus can remain latent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_latency) for a very long time. While latent, antiviral drugs can only prevent the further spread of infection as they only stop the virus from replicating. The difficulty of treating a latent virus is probably best demonstrated by HIV resurgence in patients who stop antiviral therapy even after having years of no detectable virus.
I think the idea of combining antiviral drugs with drugs that target cellular proteins will continue to gain traction and, hopefully, lead to better therapies.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 02 2015, @07:57AM
There is one researcher that succeeded in triggering the HIV virus out of it's hiding place. Perhaps that can be used with HSV?
(Score: 2) by Joe on Sunday May 03 2015, @12:15AM
I don't know about HSV, but HIV also has multiple hiding places (memory T cells, hematopoietic stem cells, neurons, macrophages, dendritic cells, and possibly others) and all of them would need to be eliminated to fully cure a patient.
The viruses don't share the same exact biology, but the concept should also work in the case of HSV. There are some research groups that are working on this problem. The use of a drug that brings the virus out of latency may also run into problems (depending on how extensive the presence of the virus is) with the death of infected neurons. Another option would be to try to prevent the virus from exiting its latency, but this would require constant treatment to prevent flare-ups.