Bovine viral diarrhea virus as a surrogate model of hepatitis C virus for the evaluation of antiviral agents.

The identification and development of new antiviral agents that can be used to combat hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection has been complicated by both technical and logistic issues. There are few, if any, robust methods by which HCV virions can be grown in vitro. The development of HCV RNA replicons has been a great breakthrough that has allowed for the undertaking of significant screening efforts to identify inhibitors of HCV intracellular replication. However, since replicons do not undergo a complete replication cycle, drug screening programs and mechanism of action studies based solely on these assays will not identify compounds targeting either early (virion attachment, entry, uncoating) or late (virion assembly, egress) stages of the viral replication cycle. Drugs that negatively affect the infectivity of new virions will also not be identified using HCV RNA replicons. Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) shares a similar structural organization with HCV, and both viruses generally cause chronic long-term infections in their respective hosts. The BVDV surrogate model is attractive, since it is a virus-based system. It is easy to culture the virus in vitro, molecular clones are available for genetic studies, and the virus undergoes a complete replication cycle. Like HCV, BVDV utilizes the LDL receptor to enter cells, uses a functionally similar internal ribosome entry site (IRES) for translation, uses an NS4A cofactor with its homologous NS3 protease, has a similar NS3 helicase/NTPase, a mechanistically similar NS5B RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, and a seemingly equivalent mechanism of virion maturation, assembly and egress. While the concordance between drugs active in either BVDV or HCV is largely unknown at this time, BVDV remains a popular model system with which drugs can be evaluated for potential antiviral activity against HCV and in studies of drug mechanism of action.