Watanabe Y, Harada S, Saito I, Miyamura T
Department of Enteroviruses, National Institute of Health, Tokyo, Japan.
Int J Cancer. 1991 May 30;48(3):340-3. doi: 10.1002/ijc.2910480305.
We have cloned the whole structural region of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) genome and transiently expressed the nucleocapsid protein in animal cells. Since the nucleotide sequences of this region of the HCV genome has been shown to be highly conserved among different HCV isolates, the assay detecting the antibody to this expressed protein is useful for studying the pathogenicity of HCV. In this work, we investigated the presence of antibodies to HCV nucleocapsid protein (p22) in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and compared its frequency with that of antibody to HCV non-structural protein (C-100), which is presently applied for blood screening for transfusion and diagnosis for chronic hepatitis C. By a sensitive Western blot analysis, 85 of 102 (83.3%) sera of hepatitis B virus surface antigen (HBsAg)-negative HCC patients were positive for the antibody to p22 (anti-p22), whereas 68 of the same 102 cases (66.7%) were positive for the anti-C100 by ELISA. The prevalence of anti-p22 in 23 HBV carrier HCC patients, 56 patients with non-HCC cancer and 100 healthy blood donors were 4.3, 12.5 and 1.0%, respectively. Thus, high prevalence of anti-p22 in non-B HCC confirmed that HCV infection is closely related to the development of HCC. Furthermore, the anti-p22 assay can detect HCV-infected patients who could not previously be identified as such by the present anti-C100 assay.
我们已经克隆了丙型肝炎病毒（HCV）基因组的整个结构区域，并在动物细胞中瞬时表达了核衣壳蛋白。由于HCV基因组该区域的核苷酸序列在不同的HCV分离株中显示出高度保守，检测针对这种表达蛋白的抗体的检测方法对于研究HCV的致病性很有用。在这项工作中，我们调查了肝细胞癌（HCC）患者中抗HCV核衣壳蛋白（p22）抗体的存在情况，并将其频率与目前用于输血血液筛查和慢性丙型肝炎诊断的抗HCV非结构蛋白（C-100）抗体的频率进行了比较。通过灵敏的蛋白质印迹分析，102例乙型肝炎病毒表面抗原（HBsAg）阴性的HCC患者血清中有85例（83.3%）抗p22抗体呈阳性，而在相同的102例病例中，有68例（66.7%）通过ELISA检测抗C100呈阳性。23例HBV携带者HCC患者、56例非HCC癌症患者和100名健康献血者中抗p22的流行率分别为4.3%、12.5%和1.0%。因此，非B型HCC中抗p22的高流行率证实HCV感染与HCC的发生密切相关。此外，抗p22检测可以检测出目前抗C100检测无法识别的HCV感染患者。
