A BETTER TREATMENT FOR HEPATITIS C

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/a-new-treatment-for-hepatitis-c.html



Two years ago, the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences paid eleven billion dollars for Pharmasset, a small biotechnology firm based in New Jersey. Pharmasset did not have a single major drug on the market, but the company had developed a drug called sofosbuvir, which promised to do for hepatitis C what protease inhibitors did for H.I.V. in the mid-nineties: transform a hard-to-treat illness into an easily managed disease. The Food and Drug Administration officially approved sofosbuvir, also known by the brand name Sovaldi, last week, six years after it was first synthesized. It is now all but guaranteed to become a blockbuster drug and generate billions of dollars in sales for Gilead.

Hepatitis C, the target of sofosbuvir, is behind what the magazine’s Jerome Groopman described as a “shadow epidemic” of liver disease and cancer: rates of liver cancer are increasing faster than rates for any other type of cancer in the United States. Hepatitis C, which inflames and scars the liver, is thought to account for half of this rise. Worse, up to three quarters of the three million Americans who are infected with hepatitis C are not aware of it. By the time they become symptomatic, they may have been infected for decades. All the while, the hepatitis-C virus has been silently doing its terrible work. About a third of the six thousand Americans who get liver transplants each year now do so as a result of hepatitis C, as the late Lou Reed did.

Hepatitis C is one of a number of viruses that infect the liver. It, along with hepatitis B and D, are transmitted through sex and blood exposure. There is no vaccine for it. In 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending screenings for hepatitis C based on risk and exposure. But, because patients don’t always own up to or remember their potential exposures, and because many physicians are embarrassed to ask patients about drug use and sex, the C.D.C. now recommends that all Americans born between 1945 and 1965—the baby boomers, who make up three-quarters of those infected—also be screened. Even so, many clinicians remain reluctant to test patients, because the treatment is so difficult to endure.

The existing treatment regimen involves weekly injections of a substance called interferon combined with other drugs. Interferon is naturally produced by the body to combat viral infections; it’s what makes you feel tired, feverish, and generally miserable when you have the flu. In the treatment of hepatitis C, it boosts the immune system. But the injections have brutal side effects: reduced appetite and hair loss, and, over long periods of time, anemia, fatigue, and depression. If the side effects of interferon don’t sound bad enough, the other drugs often cause more anemia, fatigue, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, and rash.

[mopinko]

1. existing treatments end in

liver transplants as far as my one data point. BIL was research subject for interferon. after many miserable years he ended up with a liver transplant anyway.