When Raymond Schinazi, Ph.D., professor of pediatrics and chemistry at Emory University in Atlanta, convened the first HepDART meeting in Hawaii in 1995, there weren’t really any effective drugs yet available for HBV. “Antiviral drugs were in their infancy,” he recalled. “We really didn’t have much for HBV except for interferon.”

Schinazi said that as the number of HBV and HCVinfected individuals began to rise, he saw a growing need in the field to bring together top scientists and clinicians at one meeting.

“We needed to understand all aspects of the problem, including drug targets, physiology, pathology, virus reservoir and replication, chemistry, metabolism, biochemistry and drug interactions,” he said. “No meeting covered everything under one roof.”

Today, research has come a long way in a brief amount of time. k,“We’ve made huge progress in treating HBV, with the discovery and development of drugs such as adefovir, entecavir and others,” he noted. “The meeting – aimed at hepatitis drug development – has evolved now to become one of the field’s largest meetings.” More than 350 scientists and clinicians attended the December meeting in Maui.

“It has become a premier meeting in the field,” he said, noting that the HBF’s participation is an important part of the conference. “The HBF is fully embedded in the meeting today, which brings it to the forefront of viral hepatitis research.”