Hi @nawab
This is quite an interesting result, but as always with early studies, caution is warranted.
The biggest 2 things in my eyes is that there is no obvious reason why cccDNA should have gone down that far in the patients that responded best, and that biopsies are great for telling us what’s going on in that little piece of the liver but can miss things elsewhere in the liver.
I am quite excited about the results because they provide even more evidence that the “half-life” (ie, time it takes half of the cccDNA to degrade) is shorter than we had believed for decades. Shorter halflives means it will be easier to cure HBV!
So let’s be cautiously optimistic and keep our eyes on this.
John.
Dear @john.tavis, indeed, the results are interesting but the duration of taking peg-interferon for 48 weeks is scary esp given to its side effects.
PegIntron (peginterferon-a2b) was never approved for hepatitis B, since Pegasys seems to work better with lesser side effects. Now, this is a smart move and they rebranded and approved it as a functional cure agent for hep B. The patent of pegIFN a2b by Merck has likely expired.
Great find, @Nawab. This forum is quickly becoming a great resource for new HBV drugs on the horizon with all the work that the community is doing to highlight these studies.
Indeed, like @john.tavis, I would like to keep my eye on this. It will be interesting to see exactly what mechanism is being proposed and the way they have measured cccDNA (which has been a tough technical problem). I essentially want to see the data first rather than just the press release before making any decisions.
Thomas