Hepatitis C mutations 'outrun' immune systems, lab study shows
For their study, described March 8 in PLOS Pathogens , the researchers used one of the largest libraries of naturally occurring HCV to rapidly sort out which mutations allow HCV to evade immune responses and found that mutations that occur outside of the viral sites typically targeted by such antibody responses play a major role in the virus' resistance. "We think those mutations could account for the difficulty of making an effective vaccine," says Justin Bailey, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. All told, the researchers compiled a library of 113 HCV strains from 27 patients with HCV infections followed at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. The researchers then tested each strain of the virus for susceptibility to two potent and commonly used antibodies in vaccine development experiments for HCV, HC33.4 and AR4A. Because natural HCVs do not thrive in the lab, the researchers first created pseudo-viruses us...