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U.S. drug company to team up with local school on hepatitis B cure 2013/06/03 22:36:04
Antiviral drugs for Hepatitis B
Taipei, June 3 (CNA) U.S. pharmaceutical company Janssen-Cilag announced Monday that it will work with National Taiwan University (NTU) to try to find a cure for hepatitis B within 10 years.
Janssen-Cilag, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, signed a master agreement on the project with NTU and said it plans to invest NT$200 million (US$6.66 million) over three years in the joint study.
The company said there are at least five compounds identified so far that can help inhibit virus replication and regulate the immune system.
It hopes that by working with NTU and National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH), researchers can come up with a number of drug candidates to proceed into clinical trials.
Chen Pei-jer, a professor at the NTUH's Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine who will lead the research product, said he hoped to name drug candidates in three years and complete clinical trials on a new hepatitis B drug within eight years.
Chen said the current bottleneck in hepatitis B treatment is that available drugs can only help keep the virus in check but cannot completely cure the illness.
He said hepatitis B patients need to take second-generation antiviral drugs for a long time and that only 5 percent of the patients can be cured, defined as when the virus's DNA is not detected in patients' livers.
Medication for chronic hepatitis B patients in Taiwan costs NT$3.3 billion per year, according to Bureau of National Health Insurance statistics.
Sales of Baraclude entecavir -- an antiviral drug for hepatitis B -- totaled NT$1.8 billion last year, surpassing the sales of the blood pressure drug Norvasc for the first time last year, the statistics showed.
According to Chen Ding-shinn, an Academia Sinica academician, there are some 2.4 million hepatitis B carriers in Taiwan and 350 million worldwide.
(By Chen Ching-fang and Jamie Wang)
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