Quantitation of hepatitis B virus covalently closed circular DNA in chronic hepatitis B patients

Hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) levels in the natural history of hepatitis B virus (HBV)-infection: A European perspective

“…HBeAg(À) hepatitis B is usually associated with lower intrahepatic cccDNA levels [16,17,34]. It is therefore not surprising that HBsAg levels are significantly lower in HBeAg(À) patients than in HBeAg(+) patients, as also documented by other investigators [9,10,21].…”

Control of cccDNA function in hepatitis B virus infection

“…Thus, these studies indicate that multiple rounds of infection are not needed to establish a stable cccDNA pool in infected cells. Evidence from animal models indicated that 1 to 50 cccDNA molecules accumulate per cell [3,[11][12][13] and analysis of cccDNA distribution at the single cell level revealed that cccDNA amount varied significantly from cell to cell in the course of chronic infection in the duck model, where a fraction of cells was found to contain only one cccDNA copy [14]. However, the viral and host factors that control cccDNA formation and cccDNA pool size are yet poorly defined.…”

New insight on hepatitis B virus persistence from the study of intrahepatic viral cccDNA

“…This suggests that these assays may detect RC DNA instead of cccDNA in highly viremic samples [35]. It is therefore important to develop standardized assays that could be used on clinical samples for the evaluation of new antivirals undergoing clinical trials.…”