Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers recently found differences in gene transcription in immune cells that could help doctors determine which patients with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) develop chronic infection those whose immune systems can clear the virus.
The team of investigators released a report in the journal Immunity that documented how the differences can be observed in a patient before traditional T-cell testing or clinical symptoms indicate a chronic infection, an MGH release said.
“Our primary finding – that cellular energy metabolism is dysregulated at the transcriptional level very early on in chronic infection – harbors important clues for how we might want to think about the T-cell response to HCV infection and about T-cell exhaustion, in general,” Dr. David Wolski, a postdoctoral fellow in the MGH gastroenterology unit and lead author, said in the release. “It gives us a potential avenue for finding earlier predictors of disease outcome and, more importantly, tells us what may be causing the failure of the T-cell response in chronic infection, giving us new opportunities to try and intervene before failure occurs.”
