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0:00
Good morning. My name is Matthew Evans.
I'm an Associate Professor in
the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York.
Today I will be talking about the hepatitis C virus,
how this virus was discovered,
its potential to be cured and protected,
and many basics about the virus.
0:19
This talk will include an introduction to
hepatitis viruses in general and HCV and its induced disease.
The timeline of the HCV cure.
How HCV is able to establish persistent infections,
and whether a vaccine would be capable of protecting individuals from infection.
Finally, mechanisms that restrict HCV tropism to particular cell types.
0:45
Before talking specifically about the hepatitis C virus,
it's worth describing what hepatitis is in general and how viruses induce this disease.
Hepatitis is simply the inflammation of the liver. It is often caused by a virus,
but it can be caused by anything that can damage the liver.
The symptoms include jaundice,
which causes a typical yellowing of the skin and eyes, fatigue,
and appetite loss and many other symptoms that are not always
specific for hepatitis, but can definitely be related to these diseases.
1:20
It turns out that many viruses induce hepatitis.
All of these viruses are called hepatitis, and then a letter, virus,
but they are only related to each other by their ability to induce liver disease.
Hepatitis A through E viruses are known by other names as well,
like infectious hepatitis for hepatitis A.
These are actually completely unrelated types of viruses, where hepatitis A virus is
a picornavirus, and every other hepatitis virus on
this list is actually its own distinct family of viruses.
Again, there are similarities,
and why they're all called hepatitis viruses is they all cause this disease.
They all predominantly infect the liver,
which means they have a liver tropism and they're mostly
infecting the major cell type in the liver, which are hepatocytes.
They often are associated with exclusively liver disease.
