Correspondence on Editorial regarding “HBV pgRNA and HBcrAg reductions at week 4 predict favourable HBsAg response upon long-term nucleos(t)ide analogue in CHB”

Abstract

We sincerely appreciate the editorial piece from Liang, Wong, Wong and Yip 1 reviewing our recent paper on the role of early on-treatment decline in viral biomarkers in predicting favourable HBsAg response in chronic hepatitis B infection, published in Clinical and Molecular Hepatology. 2 We agree with Liang and co-authors on the potential use of hepatitis B core-related antigen (HBcrAg) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) pre-genomic RNA (pgRNA) in multiple facets of management in the clinical context of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) infection. Our study provided serum-liver correlations in the magnitude of decline in viral biomarkers upon nucleos(t)die analogue (NA) treatment

The role of different viral biomarkers on the management of chronic hepatitis B

“…94,95 In fact, assessing viral biomarkers (serum HBcrAg and pgRNA) as early as week 4 of NUC treatment is able to highlight a group of patients who would achieve a low serum qHBsAg (<100 IU/mL) or HBsAg seroclearance in the long run. 96 This approach can help to identify subjects during the early phase who should not stop NUC and should be prioritized into clinical trials.…”