Volunteers with hepatitis B are wanted for a clinical drugs trial after a new treatment proved to be 100 per cent successful in eliminating the infection in animal trials.
Australian patients will be the first in the world to have access to the potential treatment, a combination of existing antiviral drugs with an anticancer drug called birinapant.
The drug is currently in trials to treat leukaemia.
The hepatitis B virus (HBV) research on mice, done by scientists from Melbourne's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, is published in two papers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"We were 100 per cent successful in curing HBV infection in hundreds of tests in preclinical models," said the institute's Dr Marc Pellegrini.
"Birinapant enabled the destruction of hepatitis B-infected liver cells while leaving normal cells unharmed.
"Excitingly, when birinapant was administered in combination with current antiviral drug entecavir, the infection was cleared twice as fast compared with birinapant alone.
"We are hopeful these promising results will be as successful in human clinical trials, which are currently underway in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide."
Patients are being recruited for the clinical trial in Melbourne by Nucleus Network, at the Alfred Hospital; in Perth by Linear Clinical Research, at Sir Charles Gardiner Hospital; and in Adelaide by IDT CMAX, at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
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