MAUI, HAWAII – The addition of the two latest treatment regimens to receive approval for hepatitis C essentially closes the circle on treatment of this disease, Steven L. Flamm, MD, declared at the Gastroenterology Updates, IBD, Liver Disease meeting.
“We now have good options available for all the hepatitis C scenarios you will ever see in your practice,” said Dr. Flamm, professor of medicine and chief of the hepatology program at Northwestern University, Chicago.
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Dr. Steven L. Flamm
“We’re already seeing a decline in the number of patients who are listed for liver transplantation with hepatitis C as the indication with UNOS [the United Organ Sharing database],” the gastroenterologist noted, citing a study presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease that showed that the proportion of patients who join the transplant wait-list with hepatitis C as their qualifying diagnosis has fallen by 35% since approval of the direct-acting antiviral (DAA) regimens in late 2013.
What’s special about the two newest DAA treatment regimens – sofosbuvir/velpatasvir/voxilaprevir (Vosevi) and glecaprevir/pibrentasvir (Mavyret) – is that they are pangenotypic, they are effective in prior treatment failures, they don’t need to be accompanied by ribavirin, and there is no need for baseline pretreatment resistance-associated substitution testing, Dr. Flamm noted.
“So if you have a patient sitting in front of you with any genotype of hepatitis C infection who has failed on NS5a-inhibitor therapy, you can tell them in general their chance of getting an SVR [sustained viral response] with sofosbuvir/velpatasvir/voxilaprevir is about 97%. And you can give it without worrying about what resistances they might have to begin with,” he said.