Disease prevention is a very important part of the medical system, which is very important for persistent hepatitis diseases. Hepatitis C is a viral disease that causes inflammation of the liver and may lead to decreased liver function and liver failure. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 2.7 to 3.9 million people in the US are infected with chronic HCV. Globally, the disease affects approximately 71 million people. If it is not treated promptly and effectively, it can lead to severe liver cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Some patients with chronic HCV infection for many years have symptoms of jaundice (yellow eyes or skin), accompanied by complications such as body bleeding, accumulation of ascites, infection and even death. However, HCV infection usually has no obvious signs in the early stages of the disease, and more than 80% of patients are not accurately diagnosed. Therefore, despite the existence of effective treatment options, such as Vosevi, which is a new combination of Giled Sciences' new pan-genetic hepatitis C drugs, they were approved by the FDA for early disease intervention yesterday, but patients are most in need. What we are trying to do is a vaccine that can prevent infection.
Rockefeller University Viral Science Professor, Dr. Charlieice (Charlieice), received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 2016. He has spent decades researching hepatitis C treatment options and related vaccines. Have been working hard. In fact, the previous work of his research team has greatly promoted the clinical development of treatments for hepatitis C infection, and a series of related drugs have been used for the first time in recent years. However, his laboratory and the field are plagued by the lack of animal models available for research, which also hinders active and effective research on the interaction of the disease with the immune system.
Recently, Dr. Charlieice (Charlieice) and his colleagues discovered a method to simulate HCV infection in rodents and published it in the form of a paper in the international mainstream academic journal Science. The researchers explained how they discovered a virus that is closely related to hepatitis C but can infect rats and mice. Researchers have discovered that this new animal model can reproduce the symptoms of most human diseases. This historic advancement will accelerate the research of hepatitis C vaccine.
Researchers all over the world rely heavily on animal models to study human diseases in depth. Dr. Eva Bielebeck, a researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Charlie Rice and the first author of the study, explained: Yes, this makes our job very difficult. The root of this problem is that hepatitis C is a very special virus that only infects humans and chimpanzees. In other words, researchers must rely on the infection of infected patients. Blood samples and liver biopsy study the disease. These limited and rare samples only provide partial information about disease progression, making it difficult to actually test new vaccines.
However, an unexpected breakthrough occurred in 2014. Columbia University Professor Ian Lipkin (Ian Lipkin) is studying the pathogen that infects normal mice on the streets of New York City and discovered the murine hepatitis virus, which belongs to the hepatitis C virus. Dr. Ian Lipkin and his colleague Dr. Amit Kapoor (Amit Kapoor) quickly shared the first discovered virus with HCV expert Dr. Charlieice’s laboratory. And established a disease model based on this. I want to create a rodent version.
The mouse is the preferred animal model for most modern biological research. The system is equipped with many advanced genetic tools and techniques, which can be used to study the mechanism. Dr. Charlie Rice and his team and researchers in Copenhagen have set out to study whether mouse viruses can also infect mice. They isolated the hepatitis virus from the rats and exposed standard laboratory mice to the cause of the disease. This experimental hypothesis is successful. The mice were infected with the hepatitis virus and developed many functions that mimic human hepatitis C. In human patients, hepatitis C virus infection has two consequences: the first is the acute infection stage. A small number of patients have fully recovered, but most patients have developed a chronic disease, and unless they receive treatment, it will continue to affect the disease. Dr. Rice and his team discovered that mice with healthy immune systems experienced acute illness and then fully recovered. Animals with weakened immunity will suffer chronic infections for a long time even after the immune system has recovered. Keep HCV infection. Researchers at Rockefeller University are now using innovative animal models to understand how hepatitis C spreads, how it progresses, and how the body responds to the virus.
Dr. Charlie Rice commented: "This research will help address disease mechanisms such as liver infection and virus clearance. Efforts to develop and test a hepatitis C vaccine will ultimately help eradicate the disease worldwide. "