Georgios Germanidis

TL;DR: Ribavirin exerts a significant, moderate, and transient antiviral effect in a significant proportion of patients with chronic hepatitis C and is partly responsible for the improved efficacy of the combination of standard IFN-alpha and ribavirin compared with IFn-alpha monotherapy by increasing the incidence of the initial response.

TL;DR: Sustained HCV RNA clearance was associated with low viral load and low nucleotide sequence entropy, suggesting that the replication kinetics when treatment is started plays a critical role in HCV-1b sensitivity to IFN-α and the balance between NS5A quasispecies sequences in infected patients could have a subtle regulatory influence on HCV replication.

TL;DR: Despite strong amino acid sequence variability related to strong pressures towards change, the chemicophysical properties and conformation of HVR1 were highly conserved, and this conservation of positively charged residues indicates that H VR1 is involved in interactions with negatively charged molecules such as lipids, proteins, or glycosaminoglycans (GAGs).

TL;DR: The hypervariable region 1 of HCV has a quasispecies distribution in infected individuals, and its genetic complexity is significantly higher in transfusion recipients than in intravenous drug users, suggesting that the size of the initial inoculum affects the later emergence and development of viral quasipecies.

TL;DR: It is concluded that IFN-α administration and withdrawal profoundly alters the nature of circulating HCV quasispecies, owing to profound changes in virus-host interactions, in patients in whom sustained HCV RNA clearance fails to occur.