Test May Aid Hepatitis Therapy: Doctors May Be Able to Predict Patient Response to Drugs

A newly discovered genetic marker helps identify which patients will respond well to hepatitis C treatments and which are likely to fail, scientists at Duke University report today.

Armed with the information, doctors and patients could have a clearer road map as they launch treatment -- an often debilitating yearlong regimen of weekly shots and daily pills that cures only about half the time.

"The therapy is unpleasant, to be sure, and that is precisely why both the clinician and patient would want the information up front," said David Goldstein, director of the Center for Human Genome Variation in Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, and the senior author of the study. The findings are published in the journal Nature.

An estimated 4million Americans have hepatitis C, a viral infection that is spread predominantly through blood. Without treatment, it causes severe liver damage and cancer.

Widely divergent responses to current therapies have long puzzled doctors. About 55 percent of people respond well and are cured, while others show no improvement. And there was a racial trend: In general, Asians and whites had the best results, while African-Americans had the worst.