London, Aug 17 (ANI): Duke University Medical Center scientists have discovered the first genetic marker that predicts response to hepatitis C treatments.

The researchers say the biomarker predicts who is most likely to respond to treatment and who isn’t.

“For geneticists, understanding response to treatment for hepatitis C infection has been almost like a Holy Grail,” says David Goldstein, Ph.D., director of the Center for Human Genome Variation in Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and the senior author of the study.

“The side effects of hepatitis treatment can be brutal, and about half the time, the treatment fails to eradicate the virus. This discovery enables us to give patients valuable information that will help them and their doctors decide what is best for them. This is what personalized medicine is all about.”

Hepatitis C is one of the most common infections in the world. Many can live with the disease for years without any serious complications. About a quarter of the time, however, the infection leads to cirrhosis of the liver, which, in turn, can lead to liver cancer or death or the need for a transplant.

Treatment typically involves 48 weeks of interferon plus the antiviral drug ribavirin. Some patients develop such taxing side effects that they stop treatment.

The new marker is a single letter change - a C instead of a T - in a tiny segment of DNA near the IL28B gene.

It was found by studying 1671 individuals who participated in the IDEAL study, a multi-center clinical trial that compared the two most widely used therapies among patients with the most common form of the disease in the U.S. and Europe.

In the current study, Goldstein and his colleagues found that the patients who had the single-letter change in their DNA were significantly more likely to respond to treatment than those who did not have it.

“Eighty percent of those with the favourable response genotype eradicated the virus, while only about 30 percent with the less favourable response genotype did so. With differences of that magnitude, patients considering therapy may want to know what their genotype is before they start treatment,” Goldstein said.

The discovery is reported online in the journal Nature. (ANI)