Progress in studies on retinoic acid inducible geneⅠand chronic hepatitis C / 中华实验和临床病毒学杂志

Acute infection with hepatitis C virus is generally asymptomatic. Most patients can not clear the virus and are easy to develop into chronic infection, while a small number of patients even develop into cirrhosis, or liver cancer. The traditional treatment is combined pegylated interferon with ribavirin, but the antiviral effect is poor and the adverse reactions are large, which may be related to the ability of HCV to escape the host′s immune response through various mechanisms. The innate immune response is the first line of defense against pathogenic microorganisms. Retinoic acid inducible geneⅠ(RIG-Ⅰ) plays an important role in identifying HCV virus and initiating immune response as a pattern recognition receptor.