Researchers led by Man-Fung Yuen at the University of Hong Kong tested bepirovirsen, a drug that blocks every message the hepatitis B virus's genes send, in patients with or without standard antiviral pills, looking for something existing drugs essentially never deliver: a functional cure.
In the B-Clear trial, patients given 24 weeks of bepirovirsen at the full dose reached a functional cure, undetectable viral DNA and viral surface protein still absent 24 weeks after the drug stopped, in 9 to 10 percent of cases, compared with none in the group given placebo first and only 12 weeks of the drug.
Ten percent sounds modest next to cure rates for some other diseases, but for hepatitis B, where existing drugs suppress the virus rather than eliminate it, any durable cure at all was new. Larger phase 3 trials are now testing whether the result holds up, and researchers are combining bepirovirsen with other drugs to push that rate higher.
Read the original study
A disease defined as permanent, cured in some.
Source
- Yuen, M.-F., Lim, S.-G., Plesniak, R., Tsuji, K., Janssen, H. L. A., Pojoga, C., Gadano, A., Popescu, C. P., Stepanova, T., Asselah, T., Diaconescu, G., Yim, H. J., Heo, J., Janczewska, E., Wong, A., Idriz, N., Imamura, M., Rizzardini, G., Takaguchi, K., . . . B-Clear Study Group (2022). Efficacy and Safety of Bepirovirsen in Chronic Hepatitis B Infection. New England Journal of Medicine, 387(21), 1957–1968. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2210027