Construction and characterization of infectious intragenotypic and intergenotypic hepatitis C virus chimeras

Chronic liver disease caused by infection with hepatitis C virus (HCV) is an important global health problem that currently affects 170 million people. A major impediment in HCV research and drug development has been the lack of culture systems supporting virus production. This obstacle was recently overcome by using JFH1-based full-length genomes that allow production of viruses infectious both in vitro and in vivo. Although this improvement was important, because of the restriction to the JFH1 isolate and a single chimera consisting of J6CF and JFH1-derived sequences, broadly based comparative studies between different HCV strains were not possible. Therefore, in this study we created a series of further…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• BS
  Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation
• BS
  Bristol-Myers Squibb
• SF
  Styrelsen för Internationellt Utvecklingssamarbete
• DF
  Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

  Award: SFB 638
• SN
  Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

  Awards: 63549, 3200B0, 103727
• LC
  Ligue Contre le Cancer
• NI
  National Institutes of Health