IL28B polymorphism, explanation for Different Responses to Therapy in Hepatitis C Patients

Hepatitis c infection is a major global public health problem (1). treatment of hepatitis c with pegylated interferon α plus ribavirin as a standard of care (soc) for the management of this disease, leads to eradication of the virus in less than 60% of patients (2). different sustained virological response (svr) rates in different populations is a challenging fact that has been observed by researchers and inspired them to search for the causes (3). in september 2009, ge et al. (4) in a genome-wide associationstudy (gwas) found the rs12979860 single nucleotide polymorphism (snp), which is located 3 kb upstream of the il28b gene, to be the strongest host genetic predictor of svr in hepatitis c genotype 1. they observed that rs12979860 cc patients, regardless of their ethnicity, reach svr rates approximately twice that of rs12979860 tt patients.