On 30 September 2021 around the 2021 International HBV Meeting in Toronto, ICE-HBV organized the Toronto Symposium on HBV Cure: The Mechanisms Behind Combination Therapies. The event was aimed at scientists, clinicians, pharmaceutical and diagnostic industry representatives. The symposium, chaired by Fabien Zoulim and John Tavis, debated challenges surrounding combination therapies in order to propose a way forward.
You can watch all the whole Symposium below:
You can watch individual speaker recordings here:
- Combinations of direct acting antivirals to decrease the cccDNA pool by Haitao Guo
- Combinations of compounds that stimulate and enhance function of HBV-specific B/T cells by Adam Gehring
- Pre-clinical evidence for combination strategies by Maura Dandri
- Q&A Session with Haitao Guo, Adam Gehring, and Maura Dandri
- Use of novel biomarkers to assist combination trials by Massimo Levrero
- Flares in clinical trials: Who is good? Who is bad? by Grace Wong
- HBV and HDV cross utility for drug development by Heiner Wedemeyer
- Q&A Session with Massimo Levrero, Grace Wong, and Heinder Wedemeyer
- Round-table discussion: the industry perspective on combination therapy:
01:50 Doug Mayers Chief Medical Officer and Co-founder of Antios Therapeutics
04:19 Tse-I Lin Vice President, Early Compound Development at Aligos Therapeutics
08:15 Oliver Lenz Senior Scientific Director Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at Janssen
12:10 Michael Sofia Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Arbutus Biopharma, Inc.
15:32 William Delaney Chief Scientific Officer at Assembly Bio
18:50 Summary of industry initial responses by Harry Janssen Q&A Discussion
19:33 To what extent do the companies use withdrawal of nucleos analog treatment as a therapeutic option or not?
28:17 Do you think antivirals by itself will do the job or whether we need true immune modifiers?
33:36 Would there be room for partial cure (of HBV?)
39:36 Should we individualize treatment (of HBV)?
43:25 What strategies do your companies see are viable for keeping costs down enough for them to be able to be used in resource limited settings?
46:47 Comments by Massimo Levrero
48:41 What is the time that you think is reasonable for a pure antiviral combination to be used in patients to hope to have these kind of results?