Development of Specific Antibodies to an ARF Protein in Treated Patients with Chronic HCV Infection

The hepatitis C virus (HCV) F protein is a recently described, frameshift product of HCV core encoding sequence with unknown biological function. In this study we sought to characterize the prevalence of specific anti-F antibodies in patients with chronic HCV infection and to analyze the anti-F antibody profile before, during, and after antiviral treatment in order to gain a better understanding of the role of F protein in HCV pathogenesis.