Appling Drug Discovery in HCV-therapeutics: A snapshot from the past and glimpse into the future

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with its devastating impacts in terms of huge disease burden and patient management on the world’s leading healthcare systems and jolting the world’s biggest economies, has leveraged the lesson that to prevent the transmission and elimination of a viral pandemic, endemic, or epidemic in future, a prophylactic or protective vaccine would be indispensable. In this scenario, DAAs regimens alone would not be sufficient to eliminate the HCV epidemic by 2030 or beyond and there would always be the demand for a prophylactic or protective vaccine to prevent the transmission of this epidemic again from vulnerable populations. The anti-mRNA-based treatment strategies (e.g., anti-HCV protein-specific oligonucleotides, RNA interference (RNAi), and micro RNA (miRNA)), and some potential anti-hepatitis C vaccine models have been widely and extensively studied as an alternative or adjuvant therapeutic approaches for hepatitis C in the recent past and some of those models are still in the pipeline. The approval of the first RNAi therapy against a hereditary protein deposition disorder has urged investigators to refocus this approach against hepatitis C because it represents the most thoroughly studied treatment strategy against hepatitis C in the last two decades. Furthermore, some emerging approaches like host targeting agents (HTA), nanoparticles-containing immunogens, and nanomedicine-based therapeutic agents are also in their full investigative form. In this book chapter, we will discuss and highlight emerging hepatitis C treatment approaches that could be the game-changer to vanquishing HCV by 2030 while used as an adjuvant or compensatory regimen with DAAs.