A number of new therapies for hepatitis C are emerging in clinical practice. Pegylated interferon plus ribavirin has proved much more effective than interferon alone, or the IFN + ribavirin combo, and at this time is considered to be the preferred treatment. Trials are being done with combinations of interferon and other substances, with re-treatment, with different types and brands of interferon, with longer-term therapy, long-term maintenance therapy, high-dose induction therapy, and with the more effective pegylated interferons, also combined with such substances as amantadine and thymosin. Promising research is being done on therapeutic vaccines and such things as polymerase inhibitors, protease inhibitors, helicase inhibitors, glucosidase inhibitors, IRES inhibitors, antisense oligonucleotides, and ribozymes, polyclonal antibodies, cytokine inducers, as well as treatments to reverse fibrosis, and to create new liver cells. It is possible that treatment in the future will be tailor-made to fit the patient in terms of genotype and viral load.
