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Aiymkul Ashimkhanova,1,* Dmitriy Syssoyev,1,* Arnur Gusmanov,1 Kakharman Yesmembetov,2 Arina Yespotayeva,3 Anara Abbay,1 Aiymzhan Nurpeissova,4 Antonio Sarria-Santamera,1 Abduzhappar Gaipov1 1Department of Medicine, Nazarbayev University School of Medicine, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan; 2Department of Medicine III, University Medical Center Aachen, Aachen, Germany; 3Al-Farabi University, Faculty of Medicine and Healthcare, Almaty, Kazakhstan; 4Department of Medical Information Analysis of Outpatient and Polyclinic Care, Republican Center of Electronic Healthcare, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Abduzhappar Gaipov, Department of Medicine, Nazarbayev University School of Medicine, Kerey and Zhanibek Khans Street 5/1, Nur-Sultan, 010000, Kazakhstan, Tel +7 7172 706 297, Email abduzhappar.gaipov@nu.edu.kzBackground: Viral hepatitis is the leading cause of hepatic cirrhosis and liver-related mortality, yet there are no countrywide epidemiological studies available to date in Kazakhstan. The aim of the study was to perform an estimation of mortality, prevalence and incidence of Hepatitis B and C infections and liver-related complications.Methods: Using centralized healthcare data from the Unified National Electronic Health System (UNEHS) for the period 2014– 2019, a total of 82,700 registered patients with chronic viral hepatitis B (HBV), C (HCV) and D (HDV) have been extracted based on ICD − 10 codes. Crude rates of incidence, prevalence and mortality, as well as age-, sex- and year-specific rates of incidence and mortality per 100,000 population were estimated. Unadjusted and adjusted hazard ratios were estimated using Cox proportional hazards regression modeling.Results: For the total number of 82,700 patients, 56.6% were represented by chronic HCV infection and 43.4% by HBV infection. The prevalence of coinfection was 10% for HBV+HDV and 3.5% for HBV+HCV. Both HBV and HCV were more prevalent am

The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that about 3% of the world’s population is currently infected with Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). Although spontaneous clearance of HCV infections occurs in 10-20% of patients, nearly 185 million people are still chronically infected by HCV, which is one of the leading risk factors for developing liver cirrhosis and/or liver cancers. In the HIV-1 infected population, chronic HCV infection has become one of the leading causes of non-AIDS specific morbidity and mortality. In the United States about 25% of HIV-1 positive individuals have co-infections with HCV. It has been observed that HIV-1 infection reduces the rate of spontaneous clearance and exacerbates the clinical course of HCV infection in HIV/HCV co-infected individuals, but the mechanisms driving this remain unknown. One of the major hurdles of studying the mechanisms of HCV infection over the last two decades has been the inability to grow and study this virus in a laboratory setting, as well as, the inability to develop reliable animal models. The development of the HCV pseudotyped viral particles (HCVpp) system was ground-breaking and became one of the most important in vitro study tools to test the neutralizing antibodies against virus entry and vaccine studies. Therefore, we used HCVpp to evaluate the role of neutralizing antibodies in an HIV-infected subject who spontaneously cleared HCV, but subsequently was re-infected with a different genotype of HCV. In this study, we examined the role of HCV specific neutralizing antibodies in HCV clearance and chronicity in a HIV/HCV co-infected subject who was enrolled in Pittsburgh portion of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS). The subject’s records showed a 10year history of HIV infection and treatment with antiretroviral drugs for 2 years prior to HCV infection. According to our previous studies, this person was consecutively infected with two different genotypes of HCV. By sequence analysis, the initial infec