A novel strategy for the therapeutic vaccination of hepatitis C Virus using adenoviral vectors

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Hepatitis C virus currently infects 180 million people world-wide and 1% of the population in the United Kingdom. The majority of people that become infected do not clear the virus from the body and approximately 20% of people will develop severe liver scarring (cirrhosis) and may require liver transplantation. One of the main reasons why people do not get rid of hepatitis C is that the immune system does not see and attack the virus. The current best treatment is called combination therapy. This treatment has many side effects, involves weakly injections and has to be given for a year in many patients. At the end of this treatment less than half of patients get rid of the virus. Our aim is to develop a vaccine that is given to patients before or during combination therapy so that more patients will get rid of the virus. To do this we have developed a vaccine that we hope will stimulate the immune system of patients. This vaccine is made from a part of the common cold virus-called adenovirus-and we have put a part of the hepatitis C virus into the cold virus. The adenovirus acts like a carrier to deliver the part of the hepatitis C virus and hopefully turn on the immune system. Importantly, the cold virus and the part of the hepatitis C virus have been altered to that they cannot replicate and themselves cause an infection. However, many people have previously been infected with the cold virus and because of this their immune system may try to attack our vaccine. To get around this problem we are going to use two unusual types of carrier cold vaccines that will not have infected people before. One of these is a cold virus that usually infects only chimpanzees. We are going to test these vaccines in 2007-2008 in people without hepatitis C. In this project we want to give these vaccines to patients with hepatitis C to see if we can turn on the immune system to attack the virus.