UNITED STATES: Study May Predict if Hepatitis C Drugs Will Work

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2008. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

UNITED STATES: Study May Predict if Hepatitis C Drugs Will Work

Reuters (12.22.08) - Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Julie Steenhuysen

By analyzing variations in the ribonucleic acid (RNA) chains composing hepatitis C virus, physicians can predict which patients will respond to standard treatment with pegylated interferon and ribavirin, according to a new study. Treatment typically lasts about a year, during which patients can feel as if they have influenza.

"This is a very difficult therapy to take," said study co- author John Tavis, a professor of molecular and microbiology at Saint Louis University. "If you can identify those patients who aren't going to respond anyways because they've got a strain that is highly resistant to the drug, then you just don't treat those patients and you save them $20,000 to $30,000 in medical bills just from drugs alone, not to mention the side effects."

Tavis and colleagues studied hepatitis C RNA chains to find patterns that could explain why only about half of patients respond to the treatment. Using a mathematical formula, the team found a specific pattern of changes called "covariance networks" that differed by treatment outcome.

"What we found will allow a doctor to predict whether or not a medication will work in a patient," Tavis said.

The process could also be used to analyze other RNA viruses, such as HIV. "It's a pretty easy process," Tavis said. "The algorithm can be applied fairly quickly," though whether it yields anything clinically useful remains to be seen, he said.

The full report, "Genome-Wide Hepatitis C Virus Amino Acid Covariance Networks Can Predict Response to Antiviral Therapy in Humans," was published in Journal of Clinical Investigation (2008;doi:10.1172/JCI37085).
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