Research
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) supports research to improve treatments and to develop a vaccine for hepatitis C.
HCV infection is an increasing public health concern. Without more effective antiviral and immunological treatments, CDC predicts that deaths due to HCV will double or triple in the next 15 to 20 years simply because most people in the United States have been infected for a long time.
Improved treatment strategies will come from better understanding of how the virus replicates (makes copies of itself) and how it causes infection. One of the great research challenges is to identify how the body gets rid of hepatitis C after an acute infection, which occurs spontaneously in a small subset of infected people. The successful development of vaccines will depend on understanding how the body’s immune system successfully eliminates the virus in these cases.