SonicBandaid: questions about new drugs

First, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to post here.  Having a specialist answer questions is a great help to all of us.

Many people on the board, including me, are in the Vertex trial of Telapravir, so your comments on the new drugs are interesting to me and I am sure to everyone.

Do you feel that because of the mutations, protease inhibitors have to me taken in combination with the more toxic SOC drugs and that is their major drawback, or do you think that they will not provide a substantial enough improvement over SOC to justify the risk/expense of taking them?  I hope it is the former!

Why do you think that polymerase inhibitors will be more effective?  Will the virus not mutate in the same way?

Do you think that people that relapsed after SOC will have improved chances of SVR with protease inhibitors?  

Thanks again for all your help.

[willing]

pending sonic's reply it might be worth looking at the 2nd medscape link Mike posted below under the HBV<->HCV thread if you haven't already. Looks like an up-to-date description of the new hcv-specific drugs with references, sides, and log-drop stats.

One item that I find a bit frustrating is that though there seems to be no shortage of forward-looking articles about the promise of "cocktails therapy" ,which, for now, would mean combining  an NS3 protease with a polymerase inhibitor, eg vx750 and NM283 or R1626, there is a complete absence of published data. It will be very intersting to see if the combined effects are indeed multiplicative and given that the new drugs are available it's hard to believe some pilot studies haven't yet been completed.

It's also good to see that mol bio's new tool, rnai, appears to have hcv potential:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17505476&ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

[andiamo]

Thanks for the information.  

The problem I am having is that I am very anemic and sleep deprived to the extreme, so I am having problems following discussions that I normally find fairly easy to understand

[jmjm530]

If you're not aware already, you might find this site useful for posting long and clumsy URL's since you can't post your html links anymore. www.tinyurl.com  It condenses links, so for example, the link you posted would be condensed to: http://tinyurl.com/2ltm8x  

Hope this finds you well,

-- Jim