Brief Definit ive Report

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a positive-strand RNA virus that belongs to the Flaviviridae family. Among seven distinct genotypes, geno-type 1 is the most frequent in the United States and in Western Europe (Lauer and Walker, 2001). 30 % of infected individuals spontaneously clear the virus, whereas the others develop chronic infection. Morbidity associated with chronic hep-atitis C mainly results from the development of liver fibrosis and cirrhosis, with complications such as hepatocellular carcinoma and liver fail-ure. Treatment of chronic hepatitis C with pegy-lated IFN- and ribavirin (PEG-IFN-/RBV) results in a sustained virological response (SVR) in 50 % of patients infected with genotype 1/4, and in 70–90 % of those infected with gen-otype 2/3 (Zeuzem et al., 2009). Although new antiviral agents such as telaprevir (Zeuzem et al., 2011) and boceprevir (Bacon et al., 2011; Poordad et al., 2011) improve cure rates, treat-ment remains long, burdened with adverse effects, costly, with limited availability to many areas, and may lead to the emergence of resistance. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) showed that single nucleotide polymor-phisms (SNPs) nearby IL28B (mainly rs12979860