The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with its devastating impacts in terms of
huge disease burden and patient management on the world’s leading healthcare systems
and jolting the world’s biggest economies, has leveraged the lesson that to prevent the
transmission and elimination of a viral pandemic, endemic, or epidemic in future, a
prophylactic or protective vaccine would be indispensable. In this scenario, DAAs
regimens alone would not be sufficient to eliminate the HCV epidemic by 2030 or
beyond and there would always be the demand for a prophylactic or protective vaccine
to prevent the transmission of this epidemic again from vulnerable populations. The
anti-mRNA-based treatment strategies (e.g., anti-HCV protein-specific
oligonucleotides, RNA interference (RNAi), and micro RNA (miRNA)), and some
potential anti-hepatitis C vaccine models have been widely and extensively studied as
an alternative or adjuvant therapeutic approaches for hepatitis C in the recent past and
some of those models are still in the pipeline. The approval of the first RNAi therapy
against a hereditary protein deposition disorder has urged investigators to refocus this
approach against hepatitis C because it represents the most thoroughly studied
treatment strategy against hepatitis C in the last two decades. Furthermore, some
emerging approaches like host targeting agents (HTA), nanoparticles-containing
immunogens, and nanomedicine-based therapeutic agents are also in their full
investigative form. In this book chapter, we will discuss and highlight emerging
hepatitis C treatment approaches that could be the game-changer to vanquishing HCV
by 2030 while used as an adjuvant or compensatory regimen with DAAs.
Keywords: Antisense Oligonucleotides, Anti-HCV Vaccines, Controlled Infection Models, Distinct Conceptualization, Dnazymes, Emerging Therapeutics, Host Targeting Agents, Inorganic Nanoparticles, Micro-RNA, MiRNA Inhibitors, Monoclonal Antibodies, Nanozymes, Nanoparticle Immunogens, Nanomedicine, RNA Interference, Traditional Immunization Models.
