View clinical trials related to Hepatitis C.
Filter by:After a liver transplant, the hepatitis C virus (which destroyed one's own liver) eventually comes back. In many patients, this will eventually cause the loss of the new liver and can also confuse the doctors taking care of them because it is hard to tell the difference between one's body rejecting the new liver and hepatitis. This can cause serious treatment errors that can lead to more severe hepatitis or to rejection of the liver. Some of the drugs used to prevent rejection of one's new liver can cause the hepatitis to come back in a more severe form. This is especially true for the drugs known as corticosteroids. Right now, the only effective treatment against hepatitis C is a combination of two drugs called interferon and ribavirin. These drugs act by strengthening one's immune system to fight the virus and by directly reducing the reproduction of the virus. Because the treatment with these drugs is associated with many side effects, there is little experience with treating patients after liver transplantation with them. In the investigators' transplant program, they have decided to treat all patients with hepatitis C as early as possible after transplantation and to follow them closely for the development of hepatitis and side effects of the treatment. The investigators treat one's hepatitis as early as possible, before any actual damage has occurred in the new liver. This approach has been tried before but it has been hard to tell if it has worked or not. The main reason for failure was that many patients could not complete the treatment due to side effects. The investigators' purpose is to treat those side effects aggressively so that most patients can complete the treatment course. The purpose of this study is to collect all the data regarding the investigators' treatment protocol so that they will be able to learn if this form of treatment is beneficial. The study includes performing liver biopsies at scheduled times after one's liver transplant and for scheduled blood tests to see how much virus is still in the blood. If patients show signs that they are not responding to treatment they will be removed from the study.
The purpose of this study is to determine whether the use of an antidepressant (escitalopram) can prevent depressive episodes that appear during the treatment with peg-interferon and ribavirin in patients with chronic hepatitis C.
The purpose of the study is to investigate the immune response to hepatitis C virus to determine why some people clear the virus and others develop chronic infection. Changes in immune response once hepatitis C therapy is begun will also be examined. If patients are also HIV+, the effect of antiretroviral therapy on the recovery of hepatitis C immunity will be investigated.
The purpose of this study is to test whether a six-session behavioral intervention for HIV and HCV seronegative injection drug users is effective in reducing sexual and injection risk behaviors that could lead to primary HIV and HCV infection.
The purpose of this study is to examine gene expression profiles by DNA microarray in patients who are responders and non-responders to interferon and ribavirin treatment for hepatitis C virus (HCV). Genes involved in inflammation and fibrosis and mediators of the Th-1 lymphocyte response will be looked for. It is hoped that genetic targets for future more effective and less toxic treatments will be identified.
The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of GB virus C (GBV-C) on the natural history of chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in subjects co-infected with HIV and HCV. The other aspect of the study is to assess the effect of GBV-C on the severity of liver disease due to chronic hepatitis C in subjects co-infected with HIV and HCV. This will be done by determining the point prevalence of co-infection retrospectively then following that cohort prospectively. In addition, further individuals will be recruited in a prospective manner.
The purpose of this study is to compare three treatment regimens in patients who have received a liver transplant for end-stage liver disease caused by Chronic Hepatitis C infection.
This Phase 3 clinical study is designed to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and efficacy of two dose levels of Infergen (interferon alfacon-1, CIFN) plus Ribavirin administered daily for 48 weeks and no treatment in patients chronically infected with hepatitis C who are nonresponders to previous pegylated interferon alfa plus ribavirin therapy and participated during at least 24 weeks of no treatment in IRHC-001. At the time of randomization into IRHC-001, the no treatment arm patients will be concurrently randomized in a 1:1 ration to receive Interferon Alfacon-1 (9 or 15 µg) + Ribavirin (both administered daily) or no treatment for up to 48 weeks. Patients will not be eligible for consideration to receive treatment in IRHC-002 until they have completed a minimum of 24 weeks of participation in IRHC-001. The protocol and informed consent form that will be used must be approved by the Investigator's Institutional Review Board (IRB)/Independent Ethics Committee (IEC) before the study is initiated.
The purpose of this research is to study body materials like blood proteins as well as white blood cell and liver cellular RNA in individuals with liver diseases such as chronic viral hepatitis with or without hepatoma and autoimmune liver disease. Presently it is not understood how infection with chronic viral hepatitis or autoimmune liver disease damages the liver. This research study enroll patients with either chronic viral hepatitis with or without hepatoma or autoimmune liver disease. The purpose of this study is to find the genes that are expressed in both the circulating white blood cells and the liver of patients with varying degrees of liver damage of different causes. Genes are biological messengers some of which determine how the body responds to injury. We anticipate that results from Differential Gene Expression (DGE) analysis will allow us to make predictions about likelihood of disease progression and/or response to treatment. In addition we will test the blood for markers of injury. The blood collected will be prepared differently from the liver tissue. We will use technologies to express pure proteins and then we will investigate the functions of these proteins. Nearly all drugs act on proteins, not genes, so understanding proteins is the key to really effective new medicines. Similarly the first signs of ill health appear in changes to the body’s blood proteins, making them the most sensitive diagnostic indicators. The studies we plan are called proteomics. We will later correlate the patterns of gene expression in both circulating white blood cells and the liver tissue with clinical outcome and patterns of proteins measured in blood and we hope to gain an understanding of how the disease process occurs, which may in turn help us to make more precise diagnoses and develop new forms of treatment. These techniques that we use are still experimental and so we do not yet know if they will be helpful in monitoring changes which may help us to predict the potential severity of your liver disease or even if they can be used to indicate who will best respond to treatment.
The primary objective of this study is to determine the safe and effective dose range of boceprevir (SCH 503034) in combination with PEG-Intron in adult subjects who have chronic hepatitis C without cirrhosis, and who have failed an adequate course of combination therapy with peginterferon-alfa plus ribavirin. A secondary objective is to explore whether ribavirin provides an additional benefit when combined with PEG-Intron plus boceprevir.