Hepatitis C virus virology and new treatment targets

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is the leading cause of chronic liver disease. An estimated 130 million people worldwide are persistently infected with HCV. Almost half of patients who have chronic HCV infection cannot be cured with the standard treatment consisting of pegylated IFN-alpha and ribavirin. For those patients who do not respond to this standard antiviral therapy, there is currently no approved treatment option available. Recent progress in structure determination of HCV proteins and development of a subgenomic replicon system enables the development of a specifically targeted antiviral therapy for hepatitis C. Many HCV-specific compounds are now under investigation in preclinical and clinical trials.