Highly curative hep C treatment safe, effective for drug users
Up to 170 million people worldwide have hepatiti s C virus (HCV) infection and injection drug use is a major risk factor. While the once-daily dosing, low side-effects profile, and shortened treatment duration of interferon-free direct-acting antivirals are ideal for injection drug users, most trials of these therapies for HCV have excluded persons with recent injection drug use. The CO-STAR (Hepatitis C Patients on Opioid Substitution Therapy Antiviral Response) trial sought to evaluate the efficacy and safety of elbasvir-grazoprevir for injection drug users. Researchers assigned 301 treatment-naive patients with chronic HCV genotype 1, 4, or 6 infection who were at least 80 percent adherent to visits for opioid-agonist therapy to immediate treatment with elbasvir-grazoprevir for 12 weeks, or deferred treatment with placebo for 12 weeks, then open-label elbasvir-grazoprevir for 12 weeks. They found that 91.5 percent of the patients in the immediate treatment group achieved susta