A single mutation stands in the way of a drug's effectiveness. Understanding it helps find new therapeutic approaches.

So far, there are no specific drugs to treat the hepatitis E virus. Doctors only have the broad-spectrum antiviral drug ribavirin at their disposal, which is often associated with severe side effects. Drugs against other hepatitis viruses can be used, but are often of limited help. Why hepatitis E can escape treatment with the hepatitis C drug sofosbuvir has been discovered by a team of the junior research group "Computational Virology" around Dr. Daniel Todt from the Department of Molecular and Medical Virology at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, together with researchers from Berlin, Hamburg and Hannover: A single mutation of the virus causes the treatment to be less effective. The researchers report this in the journal Hepatology on 20. Juni 2023.