This article published in the Biology News Net is about the hepatitis C virus (HCV). HCV infects more than 150 million people in the world today. The virus invades the body's immune system and creates an infection inside the body that can last for decades. This infection has the worst effect on the liver, capable of causing liver damage, cancer, and failure. Patients who experience liver failure and undergo a liver transplant are still not safe afterwards: the virus hides in other tissues and waits to infect the newly-transplanted liver.
HCV and the human body have been locked in a seemingly never-ending fight for quite some time. Although present treatments are about 70 percent effective, new resistant strains of HCV are emerging in treated patients. Also troubling is the fact that some patients have been dealing with the flu-like side effects of treatment for over a year and seeing no results.
Dr. Ram Savan and his research team have found new evidence in fighting HCV. It began with the realization that people of Asian descent fight off the virus better than those of African descent. Upon further investigation, the team noted a genetic variation in chromosome 19, located near an area that encodes for interferon-lamda 3 (IFNL3), a potent substance naturally released to protect against virus invasion.
Savan's team discovered how the variation in the IFNL3 gene was responsible for those who could and could not effectively clear the HCV virus. Savan's study was published in Nature Immunology.
This article is kind of anti-climatic, I thought there was going to be a 'bigger' discovery involved. But hey, you have to start somewhere. I'm sure these discoveries will serve as groundwork to bigger and better things down the road.
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