Altimmune (Nasdaq:ALT), a clinical-stage immunotherapeutics company, today announced results of its recently completed HepTcell Phase 1 clinical trial will be presented on April 12, 2019 at The International Liver Congress sponsored by The European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) being held in Vienna, Austria April 10-14, 2019. As quoted in the press …

As quoted in the press release:

As previously announced, this study met its primary endpoint of safety and showed that HepTcell treatment was associated with increased HBV-specific cellular immune responses. These results will be presented by Mark Thursz, MB BS, MD, FRCP, Professor of Hepatology at Imperial College, London as an oral presentation in the session entitled, Hepatitis B – Drug Development.
“I am very pleased to present these exciting HepTcell data at EASL’s Liver Congress,” said Professor Thursz, Chief Investigator for the HepTcell Phase 1 study. “HepTcell’s impact on HBV specific cellular immune responses is very encouraging and the safety profile is excellent.”
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has infected more than 2 billion people worldwide. The majority of adults infected with HBV achieve spontaneous clearance via HBV-specific CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T cells; however, more than 257 million people worldwide, of which 2 million patients are in the United States, remain chronically infected. HBV remains a leading cause of death globally due to complications such as cirrhosis, liver failure and hepatocellular carcinoma. Patients with chronic infection have profound defects in magnitude and quality of anti-HBV T-cell responses and breaking this immune tolerance is a key goal for all novel HBV treatment strategies.

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