You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Better Understanding The Workings Of Hepatitis B With A Transgenic Virus
Great article. Resteemed it.
We are indeed in desperate need of better Hepatitis-B drugs. Recently, there were quite some significant advances in the context of Hepatitis-C drug development.
As a non-biologist and non-chemist I always imagined the B and C viruses to be quite similar but apparently I'm quite wrong about this as we otherwise would be able to somehow adapt the mechanisms known to work in one virus to the other.
They have a similar cell of infection the hepatocyte, however beyond that they are very different. Straight down to their genomes, hepatitis B has a genome comprised of Double stranded DNA, while Hep C has an RNA genome. Unfortunately I am not a virologist as such my knowledge of all of the specific differences between these two buggers is limited. But yeah, they are very different, its why we don't have a hepatitis C vaccine but do have one for hepatitis B. Thus there are not even similarities between the capsid proteins. I wish I knew more background info about these guys.