Genomics Revolution

Guest Hosts: Ciara Love & Cara Katzendorn

Episode 45: Hepatitis B Virus

Script:

     Hi, my name is Ciara and today we’re going to talk about a virus called Hepatitis B. This virus is a type of species in the orthohepadnavirus genus as well as a member of the hepadnaviridae family. This virus causes a world-wide known disease called Hepatitis B or HBV. HBV causes liver cancer and the vaccine that was invented for Hepatitis B was one of the first anti-cancer vaccine. The virus was discovered in 1965 by Dr. Baruch Blumberg, which he had won a Nobel Prize for. He worked with a microbiologist named Irvine Millman, to help develop a blood test for the virus that blood centers were using in 1971. The first vaccine was originally the virus treated by heat, and then later in 1986 genetically engineered Hepatitis B vaccines were created. We should care about understanding this virus because it affects everyone and some people carry this virus their whole lives. This virus is a partial double dna stranded molecule that usually replicates by reverse transcription and has between 3182-3248 base pairs depending on the genotypes.

 

The hepatitis B genome includes four open reading frames for viral proteins. These four groups are surface antigens, core protein, polymerase, and protein X whose function is unclear but may be connected to this virus’s influence on the development of liver cancer. Therapies and vaccines continue to advance in the hopes of finding cure for this disease. In 2015, a study published in the Journal of Clinical microbiology demonstrated researchers improving techniques of identifying this virus throughout all 10 different genotypes found in patients. They designed a mix of primers based on sequencing from over 5000 Hbv patients that would help in creating a more analytically sensitive PCR amplification for detection of this virus. This may be used as a universal detection method for all genotypes of this disease.

 

In 2012 researchers set out to identify the functional effects of HBV viral integration into the human genome, in hopes of indicating how this virus connects with liver cancer. They found that the virus had many possible effects by insertional mutagenesis, viral promoter-driven transcriptional up-regulation, and genomic instability. This study opens possibilities for future studies that will hopefully be able investigate medicines to prevent the development of liver cancer in HBV patients.

Research continues to develop our understanding of this virus and the diseases associated with infection, and a cure for patients in on the horizon.

 

 

Resources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5313610/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12480564

https://www.hepb.org/prevention-and-diagnosis/vaccination/history-of-hepatitis-b-vaccine

https://hbvdb.lyon.inserm.fr/HBVdb/HBVdbGenome

http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1979/A1979HW50100001.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26112647

https://jcm.asm.org/content/53/6/1831

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3317142/?report=reader#!po=46.4286