Cross-resistance testing of antihepadnaviral compounds using novel recombinant baculoviruses which encode drug-resistant strains of hepatitis B virus

Abstract

Long-term nucleoside analog therapy for hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related disease frequently results in the selection of mutant HBV strains that are resistant to therapy. Molecular studies of such drug-resistant variants are clearly warranted but have been difficult to do because of the lack of convenient and reliable in vitro culture systems for HBV. We previously developed a novel in vitro system for studying HBV replication that relies on the use of recombinant baculoviruses to deliver greater than unit length copies of the HBV genome to HepG2 cells. High levels of HBV replication can be achieved in this system, which has recently been used to assess the effects of lamivudine on HBV replica..