疾病及处理

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 ...

RNA transcripts are produced from the 5′ long terminal repeat (LTR) of human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) under the complex control of viral regulatory sequences (1–7). The LTR from a prototypical, laboratory-adapted HIV-1 (HXB2) can be divided into modulatory, core promoter, and t ...

A rather unique feature of the human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) is the structural complexity of the regulatory sequences located in the long-terminal repeat (LTR) promoter region and the number of cellular and viral transcription factors known to interact with these sequen ...

The CCR5 gene encodes a cell-surface chemokine receptor molecule, which serves as a coreceptor for macrophage-tropic strains of HIV-1 (1–3). Mutations in this gene may alter expression or function of the protein product, thereby altering chemokine binding or HIV-1 infection of cells on whi ...

Mutations in a large number of genes have now been identified that ultimately alter the expression or function of the corresponding protein, thereby inducing a particular disease state. These mutations may be found frequently in the disease population, but may also be present to some extent in ...

Infection of CD4+ T-lymphocytes by HIV-1 is initiated by binding of the virus to the CD4 receptor on the lymphocyte surface, followed by fusion of the virus with the cell membrane (1). However, expression of CD4 on certain non-human cells does not render them permissive for HIV-1 entry, suggesting that an ...

From a technical perspective, the introduction and stable expression of exogenes in mammalian cells has advanced rapidly in the last few years. Of the gene transduction methodologies, genetic transfer using retroviruses remains the most popular. There are two components of a generic re ...