New Hep C drug reduces treatment time

Adding a new hepatitis C drug to standard medications improves the effectiveness oftreatment for the liver disease, an international trial involving a doctor and patients from British Columbia suggests.

Hepatitis C is usually transmitted by blood, often through piercings, tattoos or injection drug use. It can lead to scarring of the liver, which in some cases forces patients to seek a transplant.

About 30 per cent of people with the infection who need a transplant die while waiting for a new liver, said Dr. Eric Yoshida, head of gastroenterology at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver General Hospital.

Yoshida was a co-author of a Phase 3 trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study randomly assigned either a placebo or the treatment without either the patients or researchers knowing who received the drug the gold standard form of clinical research.

Until now, treatments were less than 50 per cent effective.

"Now you're approaching 80 per cent. For most of these patients, this means that the likelihood of clearing the virus and needing a liver transplant or developing liver cancer suddenly goes way down," said Yoshida, who also leads the B.C. hepatitis program.

Side-effect comparison

The new drug, called telaprevir, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in May, and Yoshida expects Health Canada will soon follow.

Treatment of people with new hepatitis C infections with long-acting interferon and ribavirin can get rid of the virus in up to 60 per centof people within 24 to 72 weeks, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada's website.

If telaprevir isadded to the cocktail, the treatment time is reduced to six months, the researchers found.

In the study, anemia, gastrointestinal side-effects, and skin rashes occurred at a higher rate among patients receiving telaprevir than among those receiving peginterferonribavirin alone.

The overall rate of discontinuation of the treatment regimen due to side-effects was 10 per cent in the telaprevir group compared with seven per cent in other group, the study's authors found.

Nearly a quarter of a million Canadians have the disease.

Several study authors said they had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, including Tibotec and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which funded the research.