To examine our hypothesis, we will incubate PBMC samples from obese and nonobese patients with IFN, followed by microarray analysis to compare the IFN response patterns in both groups of patients and to identify genes differentially regulated between these two groups. Identification of such genes will provide important insight to the mechanism of the antiviral effect of HCV. The identified genes will have the potential of serving as targets for pharmaceutical intervention aiming at enhancing the efficacy of IFN therapy for obese patients.
This is an open-label study. Ten obese and 10 nonobese patients with chronic hepatitis C will be recruited. For the purpose of this study, obese is defined as body weight \>85 kg and BMI \>30, and nonobese as body weight \<75 kg and BMI\<25.
