For all the experts, is this in fact new information? And will knowing this help create a cure down the line?
Dear @Mike2 ,
This is very old news. The genetic heterogeneity of HBV has been known for almost two decades. This is the reason for the failure of antisense, siRNA, therapeutic vaccines and more recently T-cell approaches and epigenetic approaches.
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Hi @Mike2,
This is the work of @JamesMHarris, so happy for him to comment a bit more on the study.
@availlant is right how the concepts of this work have been known for a while: that the virus infecting our bodies are not all the same and that there’s a whole load of different virus sequences caused by mutations, meaning therapies that target specific sequences may not work as well.
My understanding is that the real progress in this paper is that they used cutting edge technologies to find out exactly what kinds of variants there are and what the proportion is between them. The study found that there are not only changes of 1 letter for another in the RNA encoded by the virus, but also larger bits of swapping sequences. This helps us a bit more in designing new therapies because we know what kind of variation we need to plan to address.
Hope this helps,
Thomas
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