Hepatitis C Virus modulates TNFα-induced chemokine production and enables EGF to induce chemokine production in its host cell

The hepatitis C virus is one of the leading causes of chronic liver diseases worldwide. The creeping course of disease which sometimes takes decades until overt disease indicates that HCV has developed powerful mechanisms enabling the virus to manipulate antiviral immunity and the inflammatory host response and to utilize the infrastructure of the host and the host cell without largely affecting its viability. As they are major determinants of the composition of immune cells present in an organ or in tissue, chemokines play a key role for the orchestration of the inflammatory and the immune response. Hence it is…