IL-28B genetic polymorphism as a Predictor for Efficacy of Treatment with Interferon in Egyptian Hepatitis C Patients

Hepatitis C is a global health problem and represents a major cause of liver disease and socioeconomic burden. Effective antiviral therapy may prevent these complications, but the current treatment for patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection does not achieve sustained virological response (SVR) for all patients. Therefore, identification of the determinants of response to treatment is a high priority. A number of host and viral factors have been associated with treatment outcomes. Genome-wide association studies implicated IL28B single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as the strongest genetic pretreatment predictor of SVR in HCV infection. Recently, the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the European Association for the Study of the Liver included IL28B testing in their guidelines. The present study was aimed toinvestigate the possible role of the SNPs of IL-28B(rs12980275 and rs8099917) inpredicting the response to therapy in Egyptian patients infected with hepatitis C virus-4 (HCV-4). Egyptian patients were treated with Peg-IFN-alpha/RBV. A total of 200 HCV-4 infected patients and 100 healthy control subjects were included in the presentstudy. SNPs in the IL-28B (rs8099917 T/G andrs12980275A/G) geneswere assessed usinga simple, rapid, and inexpensive polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) method. The IL28B rs8099917 TT and rs12980275 AA genotypes were significantly higher in responders than in non-responder (P=0.011 and P=0.012, respectively). Significant association between IL-rs8099917 TT and rs8099975AA was observed in responder group (P=0.0152). No significant differences in genotype and allele frequencies of IL28B gene (rs8099917 and rs12980275) between males and females were observed (P> 0.05). It can be concluded that SNPs in IL-28B may be promising predictors of SVR inHCV-4 infection.