overview

2 day conference and archived webcast coverage

Following the successful APASL Liver Week 2013 held in Singapore, there appears to be a need for a focused meeting on viral hepatitis. Following the WHO viral hepatitis resolution, recognized that it is a major public health problem are recently launched the global hepatitis initiative, bringing together NGOs, liver organisations, and governments to tackle this. The program focuses on:

• Hepatitis B: long-term nucleoside analogue therapy as a therapeutic option is now established as a standard of care, but exploratory studies on how to use this with interferon look very promising as are early indicators of response using quantitative HBsAg.
• Hepatitis C: the liver community looks forward to the launch of the second generation directly acting antivirals (DAAs), which promise high efficacy, shorter duration and few adverse events. Although interferon-free therapy is still a little further away in Asia, standard of care with pegylated interferon and ribavirin still achieves very high SVR rates, and the possibility shortening therapy is indeed attractive. The problem of managing difficult-to-treat patients and non-genotype 1 patients such as genotype 3 and 6 are still being debated.
• Proposed algorithm for the management of viral Hepatitis B and C in Asia

This activity is supported by educational grants from AbbVie, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Gilead Sciences.