Question: What have you managed to reveal about the hepatitis C virus?

Ditte Hedegaard answered on 20 Jun 2014:

I think that the most interesting thing I’ve revealed about hepatitis C virus is that it infects the whole lever and not just separate parts of it, which is what most people previous thought.

The hepatitis C virus is really bade at making copies of itself and it often make mistakes it is genes (genetic mistakes are also called mutations). That means that the infected person has 1000s of different hepatitis C viruses in the body and not just one type. This is actually one of the reasons why it is so difficult to find a cure and vaccination against the virus. I have looked at the genetic codes of the hepatitis C virus in several different patients and found that the liver not only have hepatitis C virus everywhere, it also has a very similar type of hepatitis C viruses across the liver.

This means that the liver is not divided into different sections with different types of viruses and that the liver contain hepatitis C viruses with similar respond to treatment and similar ability to avoid the immune system. The more similar the virus is in the liver the easier it will be to find one cure that will kill all the viruses in the liver.

You can see a video about my work on this link http://youtu.be/vJHkIbO1RAw