Project description:With 350 million carriers worldwide who may suffer from serious sequelae, including hepatocellular carcinoma, chronic hepatitis B virus (CHB) infection remains an important health issue. Current antiviral therapies hardly eradicate the virus. Therefore, there are still imperative need to develop new therapeutic strategies and predictors for treatment response to cure the disease and avoid futile treatment. By taking the advantage of having the paired liver biopsy samples of IFNalpha responders before/after treatment and pretreatment samples from responders and non-responders, we could characterize the intrahepatic expression profiles associated with necroinflammatory activity and the profiles/signature potentially predictive of response to IFNalpha therapy for CHB in this study. RNA was extracted from pairedliver tissues for gene expression analysis. The gene expression profiles of seven paired liver biopsy samples of IFNalpha responders before/after treatment and other 3 pre- treatment samples were obtained by Affymatrix U133plus2 microarray. We also pooled samples of 11 responders and 11 non-responders to perform affymatrix EXON ST 1.0 array. This dataset is part of the TransQST collection.
Project description:With 350 million carriers worldwide who may suffer from serious sequelae, including hepatocellular carcinoma, chronic hepatitis B virus (CHB) infection remains an important health issue. Current antiviral therapies hardly eradicate the virus. Therefore, there are still imperative need to develop new therapeutic strategies and predictors for treatment response to cure the disease and avoid futile treatment. By taking the advantage of having the paired liver biopsy samples of IFNalpha responders before/after treatment and pretreatment samples from responders and non-responders, we could characterize the intrahepatic expression profiles associated with necroinflammatory activity and the profiles/signature potentially predictive of response to IFNalpha therapy for CHB in this study.
Project description:With 350 million carriers worldwide who may suffer from serious sequelae, including hepatocellular carcinoma, chronic hepatitis B virus (CHB) infection remains an important health issue. Current antiviral therapies hardly eradicate the virus. Therefore, there are still imperative need to develop new therapeutic strategies and predictors for treatment response to cure the disease and avoid futile treatment. By taking the advantage of having the paired liver biopsy samples of IFNalpha responders before/after treatment and pretreatment samples from responders and non-responders, we could characterize the intrahepatic expression profiles associated with necroinflammatory activity and the profiles/signature potentially predictive of response to IFNalpha therapy for CHB in this study.
Project description:Immune-mediated liver damage is the driver of disease progression in patients with chronic Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. Liver damage is an antigen-independent process caused by bystander activation of CD8 T cells and NK cells. How bystander lymphocyte activation is initiated in chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients remains unclear. Periods of liver damage, called hepatic flares, occur unpredictably, making early events difficult to capture. To address this obstacle, we longitudinally sampled the liver of CHB patients stopping antiviral therapy and analyzed immune composition and activation using flow cytometry and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). At 4 weeks after stopping therapy, HBV replication rebounded but no liver damage was detectable. There were no changes in cell frequencies at viral rebound. ScRNA-seq revealed upregulation of IFN stimulated genes (ISGs) and pro-inflammatory cytokine MIF at viral rebound in patients that go on to develop hepatic flares 6 – 18 w after stopping therapy. The type I IFN signature was only detectable within the liver and neither IFN-α/β or ISG induction could be detected in the peripheral blood. In vitro experiments confirmed the type I IFN-dependent ISG profile whereas MIF was induced primarily by IL-12. MIF exposure further amplified inflammatory cytokine production by myeloid cells. Our data show that innate immune activation is detectable in the liver before clinically significant liver damage is evident. The combination of type I IFN and enhanced cytokine production upon MIF exposure represent the earliest immunological triggers of lymphocyte bystander activation observed in hepatic flares associated with chronic HBV infection.