A new cocktail of two investigational drugs appears to have successfully
cleared the hepatitis C virus in people who don't respond to standard
treatment. What's more, the approach seems to work without the need for injections
with interferon alpha, an onerous medication that causes serious side
effects in many patients.
"We saw a sustained virologic response -- the virus was undetectable in the patients -- during treatment and remained undetectable after the drugs were stopped," said study author Dr. Anna Lok, director of clinical hepatology at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.
The study had two arms: a group of 10 patients received
four medications, including the two investigational drugs, the
antivirals daclatasvir (see right structure) and asunaprevir (see left structure-courtesy: ChemSpider), along with the standard
treatment combination of interferon and ribavirin. The other arm of the
study included 11 patients who received only the two investigational
drugs. Both groups underwent treatment for 24 weeks.
The 10 patients on the four-drug regimen experienced a sustained
virologic response with undetectable virus at the end of treatment and
again at 12 weeks beyond their treatment, the researchers reported. In
the two-drug group, four of the 11 patients also had undetectable levels
of the hepatitis C virus in their blood 12 weeks after treatment ended.
"The four-drug arm was very impressive. These patients had not shown a response before and now we get a 90 to 100 percent rate of sustained response," said Lok....
Ref : http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1104430
