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Techniques and applications

Breakthrough for HCV research

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 3, page 585 (2005)Cite this article

HCV primarily infects hepatocytes and causes hepatitis, cirrhosis of the liver and hepatocellular carcinoma. There is no vaccine and drug treatments are costly and have poor efficacy. The absence of a small-animal model and a cell-culture system for HCV have been obstacles to studying this virus, and researchers have relied on studying infections in humans and chimpanzees.

In the past five years, the development of in vitro HCV replicon systems has enabled viral molecular biology and virus–host interactions to be probed. Such systems use genomic and subgenomic clones that are transfected into hepatocyte cell lines. The main disadvantage of these systems is that the RNAs cannot replicate in vitro without acquiring adaptive mutations, nor do these systems produce infectious virions, so their relevance to the biology of wild-type infectious HCV isolates is questionable.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Wakita, W. et al. Production of infectious hepatitis C virus in tissue culture from a cloned viral genome. Nature Med. 13 June 2005 (10.1038/nm1268)

  2. Lindenbach, B. D. et al. Complete replication of hepatitis C virus in cell culture. Science 09 June 2005 (10.1126/science.1114016)

  3. Zhong, J. et al. Robust hepatitis C virus infection in vitro. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 06 June 2005 (10.1073/pnas.0503596102)

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Authors
  1. Susan Jones
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Jones, S. Breakthrough for HCV research. Nat Rev Microbiol 3, 585 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1221

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1221

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