Evaluation of susceptibility locus for response to interferon-α based therapy in chronic hepatitis B patients in Chinese.

In 2009, three independent genome-wide association studies reported that genetic variation in the interleukin 28B gene to be associated with the response to interferon-α/ribavirin therapy in hepatitis C virus genotype 1 infected patients. We carried out the present study to assess whether such polymorphisms also affect the therapy effect of another interferon-α responsive illness as chronic hepatitis B. Five hundred and twelve interferon-α treatment-naïve HBeAg seropositive chronic hepatitis B patients were enrolled in the present retrospective nested case-control study. All patients received PEG-IFN-α-2a based treatment and were examined for the therapy efficacy. SNP rs8099917 was genotyped using the MassArray system (Sequenom). Interestingly, the frequency of G allele of rs8099917 was significantly higher in response group than in non response group (8.3% vs. 3.9%, p=0.003, OR=0.44, 95%CI=0.25-0.79). The genotype distributions of this SNP also differed significantly between two groups (p=0.003). Our study suggested that the G allele of rs8099917 was associated with higher rate of response in HBeAg seropositive chronic hepatitis B patients treated with interferon α.