Hepatitis C virus persisting after clinically apparent sustained virological response to antiviral therapy retains infectivity in vitro #
Bibliographic record
Abstract
UNLABELLED: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) can persist in the liver, lymphoid cells, and serum of individuals with apparently complete spontaneous or therapy-induced resolution of hepatitis C and can replicate in vivo and in vitro in human T cells. The current study was aimed at assessing the infectivity of HCV persisting at very low levels using the previously established HCV infection system in human T cells. Naive lymphoid cells were exposed to plasma and/or supernatants from cultured peripheral blood mononuclear cells from nine individuals with apparent sustained virological response after completion of antiviral therapy. Exposed cells were analyzed for HCV RNA-positive and HCV RNA-negative strands and, in selected cases, for HCV nonstructural protein 5a (NS5a), the appearance of HCV variants, and the release of virions by immunoelectron microscopy (IEM). The results showed that 11 of the 12 established cultures became HCV RNA-positive strand-reactive, whereas 4 also expressed the virus replicative strand. NS5a protein was detected in the de novo infected cells, and clonal sequencing revealed HCV variants not found in inocula. IEM demonstrated enveloped HCV particles in plasma used as inocula and in culture supernatant from T cells exposed to that plasma. Overall, HCV carried in three of the nine individuals studied elicited productive infection in vitro. CONCLUSION: HCV persisting at very low levels long after therapy-induced resolution of chronic hepatitis C can remain infectious. The retained biological competence of the virus might have implications with respect to the mechanisms of its persistence and the epidemiology of HCV infection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".