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Hepatitis B kills more than a million people a year and has no cure. A new drug may have moved researchers one step closer to changing that.
The drug, bepirovirsen, cleared the hepatitis B virus entirely in roughly 1 in 5 patients with chronic hepatitis B infections. For the nearly 240 million people worldwide living with chronic hepatitis B, it represents the first realistic prospect of a finite treatment rather than a lifetime of pills.
A ‘Functional Cure’
The trials, published in May in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved 1,834 adults with chronic hepatitis B infection who were not suffering from liver cirrhosis from 29 countries across Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and the Americas. Participants were randomly assigned to receive weekly injections of bepirovirsen or a placebo for 24 weeks. All were already on standard oral antiviral medication to suppress the virus.
George Citroner
Author
George Citroner reports on health and medicine, covering topics that include cancer, infectious diseases, and neurodegenerative conditions. He was awarded the Media Orthopaedic Reporting Excellence (MORE) award in 2020 for a story on osteoporosis risk in men.
