实验动物总则

Hepatitis B viruses (HBVs) are characterized by their high species and tissue specificity. Because of the large number of patients chronically infected with HBV, the development of new treatment strategies remains a major goal but is hindered by the lack of infection systems that would allow ...

In this chapter, a method for infecting HepG2 cells with human hepatitis B virus (HBV) and woodchuck hepatitis virus (WHV) is reviewed. This chapter provides a step-wise, experimentally sensitive description of how to perform the protease infectivity assay. The assay is highly technical a ...

Much of the knowledge about hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been obtained from the infection of natural hosts with nonhuman hepatitis viruses that possess similar characteristics to HBV, such as in the duck and woodchuck. Transgenic mouse models have also been valuable in recent years for studying ...

Establishing novel in vitro model systems for studying hepatitis B virus (HBV) pathogenesis and the effects of antivirals on HBV replication is necessary because of the limitations encountered studying HBV in vivo. However, there are many challenges to in vitro studies as well.

Persistent infection with hepatitis B virus (HBV) is a major worldwide health problem, and chronically infected individuals are at high risk for developing liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (1,2). Despite the availability of an HBV vaccine, there are still more than 350 milli ...

Because of the narrow host range of hepatitis B virus (HBV) that infects only humans and chimpanzees, the closely related duck HBV (DHBV) provides a particularly useful model, which plays a pivotal role in study of hepadnavirus life cycle, virus-host interactions, and antiviral strategies (1 ...

With the advent of blood tests capable of identifying hepatitis B virus (HBV), and the development of an effective vaccine (1), one of the major challenges that remains is what to do with people who are chronic carriers of HBV. This is important because there are an estimated 350 million chronic carriers ...

Efforts to control the global pandemic of human hepatitis B virus (hHBV) infection have been hampered by incomplete understanding of viral-host interactions in this disease. This situation has been confounded by the fact that hHBV has a limited host range and cannot be propagated in simple ce ...

Treatment of patients before and after liver transplantation diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection represents a special model of treatment with antiviral therapy that has important implications for individuals involved in drug development and designing cl ...

Much of our current understanding of the replication of hepatitis delta virus (HDV) has been based on transfection studies using plasmid-DNA-based expression of HDV RNA. Although this approach is simple and has provided much useful information, there has always been the possibility that ...

Over the years different strategies have been used to achieve the expression of hepatitis delta virus (HDV) sequences in mice. The first studies used cDNA clones of HDV sequences to make mice transgenic for the expression of the small or the large forms of the delta protein (1). Subsequently, three li ...

Agents available or in development for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection fall into two major groups: immunomodulators, such as interferon-α and therapeutic vaccines, and nucleoside/nucleotide analogs, such as lamivudine and adefovir (1). Currently, the only ...

Viral dynamics is the study of the population dynamics of viral infection within the body of an infected individual. It describes how viruses spread from cell to cell, with the aim of revealing the basic laws that govern the spread of the virus within the host, their interaction with the immune system, and ...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) was identified as a cause of viral hepatitis more than 30 yr ago, and safe and effective hepatitis B vaccines have been available for nearly 20 yr (1,2). Nevertheless, HBV infection continues to be a global health problem, responsible for about 1.2 million deaths every year. It has b ...

There are few examples in modern medicine that are comparable with the enormous progress in understanding the cause and pathogenesis of viral hepatitis B that has been made in the last three decades leading to efficient therapies and the development of protective vaccines. Nearly one-tenth ...

The clinical studies that are required to obtain world-wide regulatory approval to market therapies for the treatment of hepatitis B virus (HBV) are lengthy, large, and costly. It is therefore important that those undertaking such studies fully understand the disease, the current therap ...

Seventy-five percent of the world’s population of approx 400 million hepatitis B virus (HBV) carriers are Asians (1,2). It is therefore not surprising that the majority of clinical studies of HBV infection is from Asian countries or consists of a large proportion of Asians. Because of the differe ...

There are estimated to be more than 400 million people chronically infected with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) worldwide (Fig. 1) (1). At least 20–30% of those chronically infected will die of complications of chronic liver disease including cirrhosis and liver cancer (2,3). The World Health Organi ...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection remains one of the leading infectious causes of chronic liver disease and death in the world (1,2). With the advent of universal HBV vaccination and with the availability of antiviral therapeutics, HBV infection is increasingly preventable and treatable. ...

Since the discovery of hepatitis delta virus (HDV) about 25 yr ago (1–3), no medical therapy has yet been developed to eradicate effectively this cause of acute and chronic liver disease. This small RNA virus is composed of three main elements: a 1.7-kb circular single-stranded RNA genome, two isofor ...