BACKGROUND Hepatitis C virus (HCV) subgenotypes 1a and 1b have different impacts on the treatment response to peginterferon plus ribavirin with direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) against patients infected with HCV genotype 1, as the emergence rates of resistance mutations are different between these two subgenotypes. In Japan, almost all of HCV genotype 1 belongs to subgenotype 1b. METHODS AND F...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the use of hepatitis C virus (HCV) NS3 sequencing as alternative to the comercially available Versant HCV 2.0 reverse hybridization line-probe assay (LiPA 2.0) to determine HCV genotype 1 (HCV-1) subtypes. PATIENTS AND METHODS A cohort of 104 patients infected by HCV-1 according to LiPA 2.0 was analyzed in a cross-sectional study conducted in patients seen from January 2...

Implication for health policy/practice/research/medical education: Molecular virology methods are developing rapidly and allow new insights into molecular epidemiology of viral infections. Despite the recent introduction of advanced methodology to genotype hepatitis B virus, using old but rapid and inexpensive genotyping tools like restriction fragment length poly-morphism have been utilized wi...