All I can say is let us be a little more encouraging and hopeful. There is always a positive side to everything Hope, pray and predict for a cure
Sept 27 2017 press release from arrowhead :
Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: ARWR) today announced results from studies of ARC-520, a prior-generation RNAi therapeutic candidate against chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, in a Phase 2 clinical study in HBV patients and a complementary study in chimpanzees chronically infected with HBV. These studies demonstrated that HBV DNA integrated into the host genome is an under-appreciated source of HBV surface antigen (HBsAg), a key protein implicated in maintaining chronic HBV infection.
In many patients, integrated HBV DNA appeared to be the dominant source of HBsAg production. The findings expand the understanding of HBV biology and host interactions, and could have important implications for future trial design and endpoint expectations for new therapies developed to cure chronic HBV. These data from study, "RNAi-based treatment of chronically infected patients and chimpanzees implicates integrated hepatitis B virus DNA as a source of HBsAg" were published inScience Translational Medicine.
Arbutus has set the position of its iRNA triggers in the right place to reach the messenger RNA of integrated hbsag sequences as well, something that arrowhead failed to do ,with the known bad consequences for their program.
Thus their effectiveness in reducing hbsag production in e ag neg patients is much better. However the levels are still too high for the hoped for immune activation. With the addition of interferon-alpha one can hope for further improvement.
However, I am concerned that there will still be no real effective mechanism to eliminate the integrated only cells. The reduction in the translation intensity of the hbsag will actually reduce the already limited visibility to the tcell system. Thus once the interference is removed at the end of treatment, the hbsag from these cells will likely rebound strongly, reversIng achieved hbsag seroconversion in most cases.
And any reduction in infected cell numbers will not be stable once the free hbsag antibody level is again down to minute by trapping with abundantly available hbsag, leading to a respreading of the infection after treatment end.
Very encouraging result of monotherapy. Supressing hbsag is the mainstay of immune reactivation. Adding ifn to it will certainly give seroconverting results. Yes ofcourse finger crossed.
Wow. Those results look extremely interesting.
It's ARB-1467 not 1420. Sorry