Therapeutic vaccination and novel strategies to treat chronic HBV infection

Abstract

Therapeutic vaccination for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B has so far shown limited clinical efficacy. In this review, we argue that the principal cause of this failure is the profound defect of virus-specific T cells present in chronic hepatitis B patients and we discuss potential new ways to achieve an efficient restoration of virus-specific immunity in patients with chronic hepatitis B virus infection.

Keywords::

• PD-1
• T-cell deletion
• T-cell exhaustion
• T-cell receptor therapy
• Treg
• viral hepatitis

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the staff of the Viral Hepatitis Laboratory, Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences, and Uri Lopatin(Roche Virology, Palo Alto, CA, USA) for their help and comments. We regret that many important papers could not be cited due to space constraints.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

This work was supported by a program grant of the Agency of Science Technology and Research (A*STAR) – Singapore. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.