Hepatitis C News

Opening a supervised injection facility for people who inject drugs, or PWID, could generate $3.5 million in savings in San Francisco, according to a cost-benefit analysis published in the Journal of Drug Issues.

AbbVie has submitted a New Drug Application to the FDA for its investigational pan-genotypic regimen of glecaprevir/pibrentasvir for chronic hepatitis C, the company announced.

State health officials said patients of a dental practice in Pennsylvania should be tested for HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C viruses after an investigation discovered that the practice failed to follow appropriate infection control procedures.

Sovaldi and other hepatitis C drugs containing sofosbuvir can inhibit hydrolysis of the HIV drug Viread, irreversibly affecting the drug-activating carboxylesterase-2 enzyme, according to a letter to the editor published in Journal of Hepatology.

A jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware has ordered Gilead Sciences to pay $2.54 billion in damages for infringing upon Merck subsidiary Idenix Pharmaceuticals’ patent for methods used to develop drugs based on sofosbuvir, including Sovaldi and Harvoni, which are used to treat patients with hepatitis C virus infection.

Direct-acting antiviral therapy with daclatasvir, known as Daklinza in the U.S., and asunaprevir produced safety and efficacy rates in elderly patients similar to those observed in younger patients, according to findings published in the Journal of Hepatology.

In HCV, with the pangenotypic regimens, there are very few patients who are not going to have sustained virologic responses . We must now consider getting everyone tested and then everyone treated, as mentioned by Susanna Naggie, MD.

Direct-acting antiviral therapies reduce, but do not eliminate, hepatocellular carcinoma risk. As an increasing number of patients reach SVR12, the clinical community will face a myriad of individuals who are cured of HCV but who have sustained varying degrees of liver damage, either associated with HCV or not.

In this issue, HCV Next asks five questions of Zobair M. Younossi, MD, chairman of the department of medicine at Inova Fairfax Hospital and vice president for research at Inova Health System in Falls Church, Va.

By now, many of us have seen the advertisements on television promoting baby boomers getting tested for hepatitis C. In 2012, the CDC officially recommended routine HCV testing for anyone born between the years of 1945 and 1965, owing to the much higher prevalence of infection among folks born in the baby boom era.