Letter to the Editor
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2022. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Virol. Jul 25, 2022; 11(4): 212-215
Published online Jul 25, 2022. doi: 10.5501/wjv.v11.i4.212
Cautious optimism in anticipation of hepatitis B curative therapies
Alla Turshudzhyan, Micheal Tadros
Alla Turshudzhyan, Department of Medicine, University of Connecticut, Farmington, CT 06030-1235, United States
Micheal Tadros, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Albany Medical College, Albany, NY 12208, United States
Author contributions: Turshudzhyan A wrote the letter; and Tadros M revised the letter.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Alla Turshudzhyan, DO, Department of Medicine, University of Connecticut, 263 Farmington Avenue, Farmington, CT 06030-1235, United States. turshudzhyan@uchc.edu
Received: February 19, 2022
Peer-review started: February 19, 2022
First decision: May 12, 2022
Revised: May 15, 2022
Accepted: July 16, 2022
Article in press: July 16, 2022
Published online: July 25, 2022
Processing time: 152 Days and 11.2 Hours
Abstract

Despite relative effectiveness of current hepatitis B therapies, there is still no curative agents available. The new emerging approaches hold promise to achieve cure and loss of hepatitis B surface antigen. Studies or clinical trials investigating new therapies remain small and either focus on patients with low viral load and without hepatotoxic injury or patients with hepatitis D co-infection, which makes it challenging to assess their effectiveness and side effect profile in hepatitis B population.

Keywords: Hepatitis B; Hepatitis B virus; Hepatitis B virus entry inhibitor; Bulevirtide; Transcription activator-like effector nucleases; Zinc-finger nucleases; Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated 9; Nucleocapsid assembly modulators; Hepatitis B virus transcription inhibitors; Hepatitis B surface antigen release inhibitors

Core Tip: Hepatitis B could become a curable disease in the near future. As our understanding of pathophysiology of hepatitis B infection advances, more therapeutic targets are becoming available. Many new therapies have only been investigated in small groups of patients with low viral load and without hepatotoxic injury or in patients with hepatitis D co-infection, which makes it difficult to predict efficacy and side effect profile when applied to the population of interest. Larger clinical trials in hepatitis B patients are needed to further investigate the emerging new therapies, so that more patients can safely benefit from them.