T-cell therapy for chronic viral hepatitis

Of extreme practical importance in relation to the potential impact of T-cell therapy for HBV and HCV are the efficacies of currently available treatments. New therapies for HCV have delivered remarkable cure rates, with more than 90% of patients achieving viral clearance with all oral direct-acting antivirals [13]. In contrast, curative therapies for HBV will not be available until the distant future (14). Thus, although it is difficult to see a possible therapeutic advantage of a new T-cell-based therapy in chronic HCV patients, the fact that current therapies for HBV only partially suppress but do not eliminate HBV from the infected host has encouraged research for new and more radical therapies designed to eliminate or at least stably maintain low levels of HBV replication under the control of a functional anti-host response. For these reasons, in this review, we concentrate on the development of T-cell therapy for HBV. T-cell therapy for HCV chronic infection is certainly important for understanding the mechanisms of T-cell antiviral control [15], [16], but their use for therapy appears unlikely.