14 DAY TRIAL // Patients suffering from hepatitis C, and who do not respond well to standard treatments, will soon have a new drug at their disposal, say researchers from the United States. They recently presented the chemical to the world, saying that they managed to obtain good results using it.
According Bruce R. Bacon, MD, the drug boceprevir showed great promise in trials for treating the most difficult-to-address hepatitis C cases. The expert says that adopting the innovative substance on a wide scale could contribute to reducing the damage this disease causes.
Bacon, an investigator with the Saint Louis University, is the lead author of a new paper detailing his team's research. The work appears in the March 31 issue of the prestigious scientific publication New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
Details of the drug were first presented in November 2010, at the 61st annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease, Science Blog reports.
Boceprevir is classified as a protease inhibitor. Administering it to patients increased the number of those who no longer had any detectable traces of the virus in their bloodstreams several times over.
“These findings are especially significant for patients who don’t respond to initial treatment,” says Bacon, who holds an appointment as a professor of internal medicine at the SLU School of Medicine.
“When the hepatitis C virus is not eliminated, debilitating fatigue and more serious problems can follow,” he adds. The expert is also the principal investigator of the HCV RESPOND-2 study.
Bacon explains that hepatitis C is transmitted through contact with infected blood, and that the disease is very insidious. At first, it develops asymptomatically, which means that those infected feel no adverse side-effects.
But those who go on to develop chronic hepatitis C infections tend to experience serious inflammation of the liver. In the end, this leads to fibrosis and cirrhosis, which may in turn lead to liver cancer or death. The disease evolves in the same patterns for centuries.
“These results are very exciting. In this study, boceprevir helped cure significantly more patients in 36 weeks of therapy than did treatment with peginterferon and ribavirin alone,” says Bacon, referring to the two most commonly used drugs against hepatitis C.
“We’ve gone from the discovery of the virus in 1989 to where we are now, 22 years later, when we have the ability to cure a large majority of those with hepatitis C. It’s a true success story,” he adds.
“Drugs like boceprevir are going to revolutionize care of those with hepatitis C,” the expert concludes.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently reviewing the drug, and is expected to approve its wide-scale use within a couple of years.