Interesting article about HIV. Maybe something could happen like this with hep b.
The hard part is this type of surgery has risks and is very invasive. Could possibly be deadly???
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/woman-cured-hiv-stem-cell-transplant-1.6352938?cmp=rss
Great idea, @NeptuneJ.
Indeed, there are naturally occurring variants in the receptor for Hepatitis B in populations from East Asia which have even been linked to lower rates of liver cancer (Genetic variations of NTCP are associated with susceptibility to HBV infection and related hepatocellular carcinoma).
Some particular variants have been found to make the cells resistant to HBV infection (Genetically edited hepatic cells expressing the NTCP-S267F variant are resistant to hepatitis B virus infection - ScienceDirect).
I guess one way to use this information is to use CRISPR to alter all the liver cells in your liver to become resistant. However, this won’t affect the cccDNA and integrated DNA that is still there in the cells, and so there may still be a risk of liver disease.
To get rid of everything, you would basically need a liver transplant to replace all the cells in your liver with this variant. This would be super expensive (each liver transplant here in Australia costs the health system something in the ballpark of half a million bucks) and would probably be worse than the hep B infection in most cases.
Cheers,
Thomas