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Just as 1996 was a watershed year in treating HIV infections, so 2014 has seen a sea change in treating hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections, with unwieldy, often ineffective treatments suddenly giving way to convenient, well-tolerated, remarkably effective alternatives.
Two components of these new regimens were approved late in 2013: simeprevir (Olysio), a second-generation protease inhibitor; and sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), a polymerase inhibitor. Although both were released only for use in combination with interferon alfa and ribavirin, several industry-sponsored studies published this year suggest that both of these toxic old drugs are now happily obsolete.
In a trial in which researchers enrolled only patients with genotype 1 infections (the mos…