Abstract
Hepatitis D virus (HDV) causes the most severe form of viral hepatitis, which may rapidly progress to liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). It has been estimated that 15–20 million people worldwide are suffering from the chronic HDV infection. Currently, no effective therapies are available to treat acute or chronic HDV infection. The remarkable sequence variability of the HDV genome, particularly within the hypervariable region has resulted in the provisional classification of eight major genotypes and various subtypes. We have developed a specialized database, HDVdb, which contains a collection of partial and complete HDV genomic sequences obtained from the GenBank and from our own patient cohort. HDVdb enables the researchers to investigate the genetic variability of all available HDV sequences, correlation of genotypes to epidemiology and pathogenesis. Additionally, it will contribute in understanding the drug resistant mutations and develop effective vaccines against HDV infection. The database can be accessed through a web interface that allows for static and dynamic queries and offers integrated generic and specialized sequence analysis tools, such as annotation, genotyping, primer prediction, and phylogenetic analyses.
Highlights
Hepatitis D virus (HDV) infection remains the most difficult-to-treat form of viral hepatitis, affecting 15–20 million patients worldwide with chronic hepatitis, liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) [1]
The current anti-HDV therapy is mainly based on administration of interferon with a very low response rate in patients [4,5] and high chance of relapse upon discontinuation [6]
The hepatitis delta virus database (HDVdb) building process began with the manual retrieval of all the HDV entries using the keyword: “hepatitis delta virus” from GenBank hosted at NCBI [44]
Summary
Hepatitis D virus (HDV) infection remains the most difficult-to-treat form of viral hepatitis, affecting 15–20 million patients worldwide with chronic hepatitis, liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) [1]. Two main forms of HDV infection have been described: (1) coinfection; with a high rate of viral clearance in adults similar to HBV mono-infection [2], or (2) super-infection in the presence of a pre-existing. The latter results in a persistent chronic HDV infection in 70–90% of the cases and is associated with an early risk to develop cirrhosis and HCC [3]. Efforts have been made recently to develop new anti-HDV drugs to treat chronic HDV infection, with promising results in the clinical trials [7,8,9,10,11]
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