Hepatitis is considered the world’s deadliest virus after COVID-19 with a staggering 1.3 million people sadly losing their lives to the disease each year (worldhepatitisday.org).
Hepatitis C is the most deadly form of Hepatitis. It is a viral infection transmitted via contaminated blood, that causes inflammation in the liver, and if left undiagnosed or untreated can be fatal.
No vaccine currently exists for Hepatitis C, so it is crucial that more research is done in order to provide effective therapeutics, to treat those suffering from the virus, so that they can make a full recovery.
One of SiriusXT’s partners Dr. Pablo Gastaminza from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has been doing incredible research into direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapeutics as an effective treatment for Hepatitis C (HCV), using SiriusXT’s SXT-100 Soft X-ray Microscope to inform and advance his research.
Soft X-ray Microscopy has the unique ability to image the whole structure of intact cells with nanometre-resolution. This capability allows researchers, like Pablo, to both see how a virus is impacting the cell structure as well as to see how effective his therapeutics are in reversing these structural changes. This is just one of many disease and therapeutic research applications where Soft X-ray Microscopy helps in correlating structural changes in a cell with the impact of disease and in validating the delivery of nanomedicines to targeted cells.
