A drug originally designed to treat hepatitis C is now showing unexpected potential against hepatitis E.
Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is the leading cause of acute viral hepatitis and kills about 70,000 people each year. In most healthy people, the infection clears on its own, but it can become chronic in people with weakened immune systems, including organ transplant recipients and people with HIV. It is also especially dangerous during pregnancy. Even with that global impact, there is still no vaccine and no virus-specific treatment.
Researchers have now identified bemnifosbuvir, a drug already in clinical trials for hepatitis C, as a possible way to stop hepatitis E from multiplying. Because the drug is already being tested in people for another viral infection, it could offer a faster path toward a treatment option than starting from scratch.
An international team from Bochum and Heidelberg, Germany, and Beijing, China, identified the compound by screening a library of nucleotide/nucleoside analogues, a class of molecules designed to resemble the building blocks used in genetic material. Their results were published in the journal Gut.
“These synthetically produced molecules are constructed similarly to the building blocks of our genetic material and likewise to that of viruses,” explains Dr. Mara Klöhn from Ruhr University Bochum.
Testing the Drug’s Effect on Viral Replication
To search for a drug candidate, the scientists worked through roughly 500 compounds from a commercially available library. They used a newly developed reporter virus carrying a fluorescent molecule, which let them track whether HEV was still reproducing inside infected cells.
Using fluorescence, they were able to determine whether the virus had continued to replicate or not.
“With bemnifosbuvir we were able to see that the virus no longer replicated, while the treated cells remained healthy,” reports Jungen Hu from Heidelberg University.
Follow-up studies in animals confirmed that the compound reduced both viral activity and liver inflammation. “If the ongoing clinical trials of bemnifosbuvir against hepatitis C are successful, the drug could soon also be available for off-label use against hepatitis E,” say Dr. Viet Loan Dao Thi and Professor Eike Steinmann.
Reference: “Nucleotide analogue bemnifosbuvir inhibits hepatitis E virus replication in preclinical models” by Jungen Hu, Tianxu Liu, Mara Klöhn, Andrew Freistaedter, Elif Toprak, Huanting Chi, André Gömer, Lilli Pottkaemper, Paula Jordan, Xinyue Yang, He Zhang, Johanna Becker, Shirin Nkongolo, Volker Lohmann, Eike Steinmann, Lin Wang and Viet Loan Dao Thi, 6 March 2026, Gut.
DOI: 10.1136/gutjnl-2025-336714
Funding: National Key Research and Development Program of China, Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, German Center for Infection Research, National Natural Science Foundation of China
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Follow us on Google and Google News.