"Patients need to tell their doctors what they are taking," he advised, adding that, as physicians, "we all need to be aware and maybe ask more questions of our patients."
The LiverTox website – produced by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the National Library of Medicine – is a valuable online and freely available resource for determining if a medication, herbal, or other supplement is known to cause liver problems. This is going to have a new chapter on herbal medicines, Dr. Fontana said, and is worth using in daily practice to help advise patients on the prescription or CAM they might be taking.
Dr. Larrey and Dr. Fontana had no disclosures relevant to their comments.
New Chinese herbal medicine inhibits HCV activity
A compound named SBEL1 after the laboratory in which it was discovered has multiple effects on the hepatitis C virus (HCV) life cycle, according to data from a late-breaking poster presented at the meeting.
Researchers from the Systems Biology of Epithelia Laboratory at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, screened six herbal medicines and found that one of these – SBEL1 – inhibited HCV activity by about 90% in infected cells.
Cheng-Wei Lin and Ming-Jiun Yu pretreated liver cells with the herbal extract and then infected these cells with HCV. Compared with control cells, SBEL1-treated cells contained 23% less viral protein. This suggested that SBEL1 prevented HCV from entering the pretreated cells.
Their findings also suggested that SBEL1 reduced internal-ribosome entry site–mediated translation, a process vital for viral protein production, and might also have interfered with the RNA replication process.
"SBEL1 has demonstrated significant inhibition of HCV at multiple stages of the viral life cycle," Dr. Markus Peck-Radosavljevic, the secretary-general of the European Association for the Study of the Liver, said in a press release issued by the Society.
Dr. Peck-Radosavljevic (University of Vienna, Austria), who was not involved in the research, added that this "is an exciting discovery because it allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the virus and its interactions with other compounds. Ultimately, this adds to our library of knowledge that may bring us closer to improving future treatment options."
