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  • Support Services for Families Facing Liver Cancer Webinar

    What support services are available for patients and families that are facing liver cancer? Are there any assistance programs to help pay for treatment or other costs? What about online or community support? Listen to this webinar from the Hepatitis B Foundation's Liver Cancer Connect program. Guest speakers Karla Pillote, a nurse practitioner at Johns Hopkins' Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington DC, and Andrea Wilson, founder of BlueFaery: The Adrienne Wilson Liver Cancer Association, explain how families can access valuable services. Be sure to visit Liver Cancer Connect for all you need to know about liver cancer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEHj1tDdJfk&feature=youtu.be

    http://www.hepb.org/blog/support-services-for-families-facing-liver-cancer-webinar/
  • May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

    In celebration of Asian Pacific Heritage Month, Dr. moon Chen, Principal Investigator for the Asian American Network for Cancer Awareness Research and Training (AANCART) and UC Davis professor, reflects on the unnecessary cancer burden in Asian American and Pacific Islanders, including the burden of  hepatitis B related liver cancer.  Asian Pacific Heritage Month….what a great time to reflect on being an Asian Pacific American and reflect on the opportunities and obligations it provides, particularly with respect to our unique, unusual, but unnecessary cancer burden! First, opportunities: Each of us needs to realize we are special….there is no one else in the world like us (nor will there ever be)….For example, in terms of diversity, whether it is in terms of 100s of languages or dialects spoken and our rich cultures or the fact that the U.S. Census considers us to originate from Asia where more than half of the world lives or from Pacific Islands whose expanse exceeds the North American continent by many-fold….no one is as diverse as us! Think of the number of time zones and even a different day (International Date Line) that circumscribe where we live. Through our diversity, we can offer the potential of many pathways to health and healthful living. Read more.

    http://www.hepb.org/blog/may-is-asian-pacific-american-heritage-month/
  • Cambodian Orphan Finds New Life in Minnesota

    A lovely story and a happy ending for a young Cambodian orphan with hepatitis B.  By MATTHEW STOLLE, Post-Bulletin Posted July 19 When Chung Eang Lip was 7, his father took him to the market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and abandoned him. For three days, Lip wandered the city's streets, hungry and calling for his mother. Lip's last memory from the ordeal was waking up and seeing his mom hovering over him. "I was really sick. I didn't have anything to eat for those three days. I only remember that when I opened my eyes, I saw my mom and that's all," said Lip, whose mom took him back to their rural home. By 13, both of Lip's parents were dead, and he was largely on his own, living with an older brother. What most people regard as normal family life — or what passed for it in Lip's life — was largely a thing of the past. Or so he thought.  Read more of this touching story here.

    http://www.hepb.org/blog/cambodian-orphan-finds-new-life-in-minnesota/
  • Screening At-Risk Patients for Liver Cancer, Uncertain

    A recent analysis of studies that looked at the benefits of screening concluded that the evidence remains insufficient to make a strong case for or against screening. The authors of an accompanying editorial did note, however, that screening has a much greater potential to be beneficial in the highest-risk patients, and it is appropriate to allow clinicians caring for these patients to continue to offer screening. Clearly, more data are needed. Although current liver cancer screening methods are not perfect, the Hepatitis B Foundation encourages liver cancer screening. Early detection can give patients more treatment options, and potentially a greater chance of successful treatment. Screening does save lives.    Roxanne Nelson, Medscape, June 19, 2014, reports on study published online June 16 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.  When looking at the effects of screening on mortality, 2 clinical trials and 18 observational studies provided very-low-strength evidence from which to draw conclusions about the mortality effects of HCC screening, as compared with no screening. Both of the trials were conducted in China in areas with high HCC prevalence, and most participants had hepatitis B with or without cirrhosis. One of the trials (n = 9757) offered serum α-fetoprotein testing and ultrasonography every 6 months, and participants in the control group (n = 9443) were not made aware of the study or actively followed. HCC mortality was less frequent in the screened group (83.2 vs 131.5 per 100,000 person-years; rate ratio, 0.63). Read article in its entirety here.

    http://www.hepb.org/blog/screening-at-risk-patients-for-liver-cancer-uncertain/
  • Gilead Lead Chronic HepB Candidate GS-9620 Conceived as a More Patient-Friendly Interferon

    Harnessing the Power of RNAi Gene Silencing in a Quest of a Cure for Chronic Hepatitis B, and the  HBV KnockDown blog written by Dirk Haussecker, who believes it's about time everyone got serious about a functional cure for hepatitis B.  As I was reading the latest PK-PD study by Gilead on its lead experimental chronic HepB drug candidate GS-9620 (Fosdick et al. 2013), it finally dawned on me that much-touted GS-9620 has been designed to be nothing more than a better tolerated, more convenient version of an already existing treatment option, recombinant interferon.  GS-9620 is therefore an example of the typical incrementalist Big Pharma value creation strategy.  By contrast, if successful, an HBsAg knockdown approach such as with Arrowhead’s ARC520 would bring to healthcare providers and patients an entirely new, desperately needed treatment option as the field has become stuck with interferons and RT inhibitors for years.  GS-9620 checks a number of boxes for an interferon-better Interferons for the treatment of chronic HepB and HepC is widely regarded as a mixed blessing.  In light of its very poor tolerability, including flu-like symptoms and depression, patients often opt not to be potentially cured instead of suffering through a year or so of feeling just miserable.  Of course, it does not help that after all this, the prospects of a (functional) cure still remain depressingly low in the case of HepB, on the order of 10% for the gold standard HBsAg seroconversion. Gilead is developing the orally administered, small molecule toll-like receptor 7 (TLR7) agonist GS-9620 in order to provoke natural interferon production along the GI-liver axis without causing systemic exposures with interferon.  It is the systemic, body-wide actions of interferon that are responsible for its poor tolerability. This is supported by the PK-PD data in Fosdick et al. that show that while GS9620 is efficiently taken up in the GI tract, it does not make it out of the liver

    http://www.hepb.org/blog/gilead-lead-chronic-hepb-candidate-gs-9620-conceived-as-a-more-patient-friendly-interferon/