New Hepatitis C Treatment Cures 90 Percent of Patients with Liver Cirrhosis

A new experimental treatment for Hepatitis C successfully cured over 90 percent of the patients with liver cirrhosis in just twelve weeks, a new finding claims.

In a major breakthrough, researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio investigated a new oral therapy and found that the therapy cured hepatitis C in over 90 percent of patients with liver cirrhosis (liver scarring)  and also the therapy was well tolerated by the patients.

 This is a turning point in hepatitis C treatment as the cure rate among these patients has been less than 50 percent.

Statistics according to the World Health Organization reveal that a whopping 130-150 million suffer with chronic hepatitis C infections, globally. And nearly 350,000-500,000 of them die every year due to the liver disease linked to hepatitis C that occurs due to the attack of a virus on the liver causing inflammation. Hepatitis C is the leading cause of liver transplants, liver cancer and cirrhosis in the United States.

Prior to this new revolutionary treatment, the only effective treatment against hepatitis C was 'Interferon'. But this therapy did benefit most of the patients as most suffered a relapse and the therapy led to multiple side effects.  

The new oral therapy is free of interferon and has several agents that include ABT-450/ritonavir, ombitasvir, dasabuvir and ribavirin.

The new drug was tested on over 380 patients in 78 centers in two studies. In the first study, the patients received the oral therapy for 12 weeks and in the second test for 24 weeks. All  the patients reported having liver cirrhosis.  Twelve week after giving the last dose, the researchers noticed the absence of the hepatitis C virus in 91.8 percent of patients as no virus was detected in their bloodstream.

Those who were treated for 24 weeks, 95.9 percent of them were virus free by the end of the therapy.

"These are out-of-the-ballpark response rates, not on the same planet as interferon," Dr. Fred Poordad, M.D., lead author on the study said in a statement.  "The reason this study is so profound is because interferon is not tolerated nor is it safe in many people with cirrhosis. Many of the patients with cirrhosis in this study were not even eligible to be treated with interferon."

This combination new medication regimen is expected to hit the market by the end of this year or early 2015. And the researchers have been cataloguing patients' blood samples for three years after the therapy and till date have not noticed relapses.

The finding was published in The New England Journal of Medicine.