Status of hepatitis C virus vaccination: Recent update

Core Tip

Core tip: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a major global public health problem. Chronic HCV infection affected around 130-150 million of the world’s population. The current treatment is expensive, showed some restrictions and is not efficient for all patients. No licensed vaccine is available for clinical use, however, researches on developing a preventive and therapeutic safe vaccine, are evolving. This review gives an overview of HCV structure, immune response and viral evasion mechanisms. It also evaluates the available preventive and therapeutic vaccines that induce innate, antibody-mediated immune response, cell-mediated immune response and interferon, and highlights the progress in recent HCV vaccination studies either in preclinical or clinical phases.