NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Immunizing infants against hepatitis B virus (HBV) appears to reduce their risk of developing hepatocellular carcinoma as children or young adults, according to a study from Taiwan.

Researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Washington analyzed data from 183 countries between 1990 and 2013, and discovered that viral hepatitis has become a leading cause of death worldwide over the past 23 years, killing as many per year as tuberculosis (TB), malaria or HIV/AIDS.

Based on preliminary positive safety data, a Safety Review Committee has recommended that a Phase 1/1b clinical trial be continued with TG1050, an immunotherapy candidate being developed by Transgene for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection.

ContraVir Pharmaceuticals announced the dosing of the first patients with chronic hepatitis B enrolled in its head-to-head Phase 2a clinical trial comparing multiple doses of the company’s lead candidate CMX157 to tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF), a standard therapy. Specifically, the trial will compare a lower dose of CMX157 to the commonly used dose of TDF (Viread, Gilead Sciences).

The proinflammatory cytokine IL-17 drives the development of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH — a disease that often leads to liver cancer, researchers at the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), in Spain, reported.

Liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) are highly specialized endothelial cells representing the interface between blood cells on the one side and hepatocytes and hepatic stellate cells on the other side.

Receptor tyrosine kinases MET and EGFR are critically involved in initiation of liver regeneration. Other cytokines and signaling molecules also participate in the early part of the process. Regeneration employs effective redundancy schemes to compensate for the missing signals. Elimination of any single extracellular signaling pathway only delays but does not abolish the process.

The pathomechanisms underlying non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and the involved molecular regulators are incompletely explored. The nuclear factor-kappa B (NFκB)-cofactor gene B-cell leukemia-3 (bcl-3) plays a critical role in altering the transcriptional capacity of NFκB - a key inducer of inflammation - but also of genes involved in cellular energy metabolism.

Delayed HBV or HCV diagnosis may increase risk of advanced liver disease complications, including decompensated cirrhosis (DC) and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The aim of this study was to characterise “late hepatitis notification” among people with an HBV/HCV notification and advanced liver disease in New South Wales, Australia.

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has been associated with subclinical atherosclerosis in cross-sectional studies. We investigated the longitudinal association of NAFLD with the development of subclinical carotid atherosclerosis.