Association Between ABCB1 (MDR1) Gene Polymorphism and Unresponsiveness Combined Therapy in Chronic Hepatitis C virus

Background: to treat viral infection of chronic hepatitis c (chc) is a main strategy to prevent progression of liver disease, and cancer. some patients with chc have failed to respond to the common antiviral therapy in different populations. objectives: in the current study it was aimed to find out the possible role of multiple drug resistance gene1 (mdr1) in non-responder patients with chc infection in turkish population. patients and methods: peripheral blood-edta samples were used for total genomic dna isolation. in total of 55 patients with chronic hepatitis c and positive results for genotype 1 [31 male (56.4%), 24 female (43.6%) and mean age-min-max; 56.9 ± 9.66 (39-71)]; 19 responder (34.5%), 21 non responder (38.2%), and 15 recurrence (27.3%) were included in the presented results. functional mdr1 gene was genotyped by multiplex pcr-based reverse-hybridization strip assay method, and some samples were confirmed by direct sequencing. results: our results indicate that mdr1 gene polymorphism is strongly associated with non-responder patients and those with recurrent chronic hepatitis c during conventional drug therapy when compared to the responder patients. homozygous of the tt genotype for mdr1 exon 26 polymorphism was at 2.0-fold higher risk of non-responder than patients with cc and ct. conclusions: the homozygous mdr1 3435tt genotype which encodes the xenobiotic transporter p-glycoprotein may be associated with a poor antiviral response in hcv chronicity during conventional therapy, and large-scale studies are needed to validate this association.