Treating hepatitis C in Pakistan. Strategies to avoid resistance to antiviral drugs

Chronic infection with hepatitis C virus causes liver damage and, in many, liver cancer. We have effective drugs allowing us to cure most infected people and this stops the liver becoming damaged. Hepatitis C is common in Pakistan and government is planning a massive national program to find and treat everyone who is infected. We don't know how effective the drugs that will be used in Pakistan will be and we will study this. We will look at why people don't respond to treatment by studying viral resistance and we will look at ways to avoid and overcome this. This work will help make treatments more effective in Pakistan and we will work out, by modelling, how many people need to be cured to stop the spread of infection. We will look at which viruses cause cancer to help find better ways to screen and treat hepatitis C induced cancers.