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But before I go
onto that, let me walk through the evolution of HCV treatment in HCV
mono-infected patients over the last decade. We started with Interferon
monotherapy for 24 weeks, which resulted in sustained viral eradication in
only about 6% of patients. Increasing the duration of treatment to 48 weeks
increased that response rate to 16%. Addition of ribavirin more than doubled
the response rates if you treated these patients for 48 weeks. Enter
pegylated IFN and it alone achieves that the standard IFN plus ribavirin
were able to do together. The next obvious step was to try Peg plus RBV
which achieves sustained viral eradication in over half the patients –
beating the 50% psychological barrier of 50% for the first time. Makes me
wish my stocks would perform like that!
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