Hepatitis

Liver disease is the only major cause of death still increasing year-on-year. It is the fifth biggest killer in England and Wales, and kills more people than diabetes and road deaths combined. At least 250,000 people in the UK and 130-200 million people worldwide are thought to be infected with the blood-borne Hepatitis C virus (HCV), which can cause severe liver damage in up to 20 per cent of patients. HCV is a smouldering international public health crisis – it is ten times easier to contract than HIV and the number of infected cases is increasing.

Since 2010, the Medical Research Foundation has been trying to increase understanding of the key issues associated with HCV infection by providing £1.94m of funding for the establishment of a national clinical research database and biobank to support HCV research.

The HCV Research UK resource was established by a consortium of clinicians and scientists from across the UK led by Professor John McLauchlan at the MRC University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research and Professor Will Irving of the University of Nottingham. The central aim of the resource is to support researchers asking fundamental clinical and scientific questions about HCV virus by making clinical data and samples available to the UK and international research communities.

Patients were keen to get involved and over 11,000 patients from over 60 centres across the UK donated their clinical data and samples – a powerful commitment from patients and only possible in the UK with its integrated health care systems. The HCV Research UK resource is now one of the largest HCV cohorts in the world. It has underpinned 65 large and small-scale research studies in the UK, Europe and Australia and has exceeded our initial expectations of its potential to change the lives of people with HCV.

Most significantly, it provided samples for the pharmaceutical industry to assess the effectiveness of new life-changing drug therapies that were being introduced into the clinic and, following NHS England’s decision to make these new treatments available to very ill patients on the condition that their samples were deposited with the HCV Research UK resource, it will give clinicians around the world invaluable insights into the performance of these new therapies outside the usual confines of a clinical trial.

The power of the resource did not end there. STOP-HCV, a £5.2m research programme funded by the MRC to understand better the progression of the disease and to optimise treatments for HCV patients has used data and samples from the HCV Research UK resource, which would not have been possible without the Medical Research Foundation’s investment. One of the requirements of our support was that the resource should become self-sustaining and raise funds through access to the samples to secure its long-term future.

This has proven a successful model and although our funding is coming to an end, the resource has sufficient funds to sustai it and look to future research questions. It has a current focus on recruiting patients with cirrhosis to evaluate the progression or regression of liver disease in those who do and do not respond to current therapy.

The HCV Research UK resource has been a fantastic success story for the Medical Research Foundation and for the donors who made this possible – the late Miss Effie Millar Munro and Mr Alfred Tartellin who left legacies to the MRC to support research into liver diseases. But more importantly, it has been a huge step forward for the health of the individuals in the UK and around the world who are infected with HCV and who will benefit from the research results that are being generated.

This has been an amazing collaboration between the Medical Rsearch Foundation, HCV scientists and clinicians and the patients who generously donated biological samples and clinical data that have, and will continue to have, a lasting impact on human health.