New Drug Offers 'Functional Cure' for Dangerous Liver Virus

An experimental hepatitis B drug, bepirovirsen from GSK and Ionis, helped about 20% of trial participants stay virus-free after stopping treatment.

The finding, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented in Barcelona, points to a possible functional cure rather than lifelong suppression.

That matters because chronic hepatitis B affects hundreds of millions of people and can progress to liver cancer or liver failure.