Drug Resistance Profile and Clinical Features for Hepatitis C Patients Experiencing DAA Failure in Taiwan

作者：Chun‐Ming Hong, You-Yu Lin, Chun‐Jen Liu, Ya-Yun Lai, Shiou‐Hwei Yeh, Hung‐Chih Yang, Jia‐Horng Kao, Shih–Jer Hsu, Yi‐Hsiang Huang, Sheng‐Shun Yang, Hsing‐Tao Kuo, Pin‐Nan Cheng, Ming‐Lung Yu, Pei‐Jer Chen · 发表于：Viruses · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.3390/v13112294 · 被引用次数：8 · 研究领域：Hepatitis C virus research、HIV/AIDS drug development and treatment、Hepatitis B Virus Studies

About 4% of the population in Taiwan are seropositive for anti-HCV Ab and 70% with HCV RNA. To address this high chronic hepatitis C disease load, Taiwan National Health Insurance started reimbursing genotype-specific DAAs in 2017 and pangenotype DAAs in mid-2018. With a 97% SVR12 rate, there were still 2-3% of patients that failed to clear HCV. To understand the causes of DAA failure in Taiwan, we conducted a multi-center, clinical, and virologic study. A total of 147 DAA-failure patients were recruited, and we searched HCV NS3/4A, NS5A and NS5B for known resistance-associated substitutions (RASs) by population sequencing, and conducted whole genome sequencing (WGS) for those without known RASs. A total of 107 patients received genotype-specific DAAs while 40 had pangenotype DAAs. Clinically, the important cause of failure is poor adherence. Virologically, common RASs in genotype-specific DAAs were NS5A-L31, NS5A-Y93, and NS5B-C316, while common RASs in pangenotype DAAs were NS5A-L31, NS5A-A/Q/R30, and NS5A-Y93. Additionally, new amino acid changes were found by WGS. Finally, we identified 12 cases with inconsistent baseline and post-treatment HCV genotypes, which is suggestive of re-infection rather than treatment failure. Our study described the drug resistance profile for DAA failure in Taiwan, showing differences from other countries.