Impact of IL28B gene variants (rs12979860) in peg-IFN therapy against Chronic Hepatitis B Pakistani patients

Background: Genome wide association studies elucidate that IL28B rs12979860 genetic polymorphism has a substantial role as a pretreatment predictor during PEG-IFN therapy in Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, however its role in chronic hepatitis B (CHB) is ambiguous. Methods: In this study, we have investigated the role of IL28B variant rs12979860 for chronic hepatitis B (CHB) infection. 200 CHB patients were treated for 24 weeks, then we carried out our study on these patients. Moreover, all patients were investigated for IL28B rs12979860 genotypes CC, CT, TT through RT-PCR. Based on our preliminary results we categorized these patients into two groups i.e. Responder ¢R (n = 104) and Non-responder¢NR (n = 96). Results: The proportion of IL28B CC, CT, TT genotypes were in both responder and non-responder groups as (72.1%, 25.0%, 2.9% vs 53.1%, 40.6%, 6.2% respectively; P = 0.02). In this study CC was the most frequent genotype, which has significant outcome in PEG-IFN therapy in both R and NR groups (72.1% vs 53.1%) (P = 0.03), while CT and TT were found as (25.0% vs 40.6%) (P = 0.1, 2.09% vs 6.2%) (P = 0.3) respectively. Conclusion: Current study clearly demonstrates that IL28B rs12979860 polymorphism is a pretreatment predictor during PEG-IFN therapy in CHB infection, and patients with favorable genotype of rs12979860 (CC) may clear the virus than the non-favorable genotypes (CT, TT) in Pakistani population