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Updated: Jun 7, 2026

"Liver-on-a-Chip" Cultures of Primary Hepatocytes and Kupffer Cells for Hepatitis B Virus Infection
Published on: February 19, 2019
The "original" hepatitis B virus of Eastern chimpanzees (Pan trogrodytes schweinfurthii)
Lawrence Mugisha1, Marco Kaiser, Heinz Ellerbrok
1Chimpanzee Sanctuary & Wildlife Conservation Trust, PO Box 884, Entebbe, Uganda.
Abstract:
Little is known about Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) infections in chimpanzees. Therefore, we investigated the prevalence of chimpanzee HBV (chHBV) infections in captive, wild born chimpanzees in the sanctuary on Ngamba Island, Uganda and one sample from a wild free ranging chimpanzee. In one third of the plasma samples (32.4%; 12/37) we detected antibodies to Hepatitis B (core) antigen. Amongst those individuals HBV DNA was detected in one captive wild born and the wild chimpanzee. In contrast to the only available earlier described HBV sequence from the subspecies Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, there was no evidence of recombination with human HBV. Our sequences therefore are likely to present the "original" chHBV from P. t. schweinfurthii.
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