Journal article

Hepatitis C virus treatment for prevention among people who inject drugs: Modeling treatment scale-up in the age of direct-acting antivirals

NK Martin, P Vickerman, J Grebely, M Hellard, SJ Hutchinson, VD Lima, GR Foster, JF Dillon, DJ Goldberg, GJ Dore, M Hickman

Hepatology | LIPPINCOTT WILLIAMS & WILKINS | Published : 2013

Open access

Abstract

Substantial reductions in hepatitis C virus (HCV) prevalence among people who inject drugs (PWID) cannot be achieved by harm reduction interventions such as needle exchange and opiate substitution therapy (OST) alone. Current HCV treatment is arduous and uptake is low, but new highly effective and tolerable interferon-free direct-acting antiviral (DAA) treatments could facilitate increased uptake. We projected the potential impact of DAA treatments on PWID HCV prevalence in three settings. A dynamic HCV transmission model was parameterized to three chronic HCV prevalence settings: Edinburgh, UK (25%); Melbourne, Australia (50%); and Vancouver, Canada (65%). Using realistic scenarios of futur..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Medical Research Council


Funding Acknowledgements

We thank Avril Taylor and Norah Palmateer for Scottish Needle Exchange Surveillance Initiative data; Peter Hayes and Hamish Inness for Scottish HCV Clinical Database data; Kate Templeton and Allan McLeod for Edinburgh genotype data; Rebecca Jenkinson, Rachel Sacks-Davis, Campbell Aitken, Peter Higgs, Paul Dietze, and the participants of Networks and MIX for Melbourne data; Maryam Alavi for CHASE treatment uptake data; Evan Wood, Thomas Kerr, Julio Montaner, Kora DeBeck, and the study participants of VIDUS (supported by National Institutes of Health grant R01DA011591); and current and past researchers and staff for Vancouver data and comments.