Hepatitis C cured in co-infected HIV patients

A multicenter team of researchers report that in a Phase III clinical trial, a combination drug therapy cures chronic hepatitis C in the majority of patients co-infected with both HIV and hepatitis C.

"In many settings, hepatitis C is now a leading cause of death among HIV co-infected patients," says Mark Sulkowski, medical director of the Johns Hopkins Infectious Disease Center for Viral Hepatitis and professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Around one-third of HIV patients in the USA have hepatitis C, with an estimated 7 million co-infected patients worldwide.

Because of poor tolerability to the previous standard of treatments for hepatitis C, including injections of interferon-alpha and medications that can have interactions with anti-retroviral medications used to treat HIV, this population of co-infection patients has been considered difficult to treat.