Gina Mamdouh Gayed
Dar El Tarbiah American School, Cairo, EGYPT
Hepatitis C virus (HCV), a member of the Flaviviridae family of viruses, is a major cause of chronic hepatitis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Because it does not have a proper antigen presentation, it is able to elude the host`s immune response, and thus, attempts to create vaccines against the virus have not shown any success.
Combination therapy of the more stable, pegylated IFN alfa and ribavirin improves response rate to more than 50% with some side effects, which makes it the standard treatment for chronic HCV. However, most patients with chronic HCV infection, especially those infected with genotype 4 of the virus, are not candidates for IFN alfa-based therapies, and the IFN alfa-treatments has limited efficacy in immunocompromised patients while treatment of HCV/HIV co-infection presents another challenge. So the development of alternative therapeutic interventions based on newer strategies is urgently needed. A novel strategy that has emerged in the last few years is to target HCV genomic RNA by using siRNA technology, which inhibits gene expression by inducing cleavage of the target.
In this study, we tested the efficiency of siRNA in inhibiting the hepatitis C viral replication in vitro while we used autologous oval cells developed from cultured stem cells to rebuild the diseased liver.
Indeed, siRNA could be a new molecular target therapy to inhibit HCV replication in the presence of more than one HCV quasispecies. This technology, if merged with the rebuilding of the diseased liver with oval cells, could possibly help conquer the severe liver damage the virus causes.