Abundant Drug-Resistant NS3 Mutants Detected by Deep Sequencing in Hepatitis C Virus-Infected Patients Undergoing NS3 Protease Inhibitor Monotherapy

The high genetic variation of hepatitis C virus (HCV) results in rapid selection of drug resistance mutations (DRMs) during monotherapy with direct-acting antivirals (DAAs). It has been proposed that each possible single mutant preexists in infected individuals; however, the levels of preexisting DRMs are too low to be directly quantified in most patients using current techniques. In this study, we evaluated the presence of DRMs in HCV-infected patients treated with the HCV protease inhibitors GS-9256 or GS-9451 as monotherapy using deep sequencing in 137 longitudinal samples from 45 patients. Software was developed to analyze deep-sequencing results with an assay cutoff of 0.25%. No NS3 DRMs that confer resistance to GS-9256 and GS-9451 (R155K, A156T, and D168V/E) were observed in 33 baseline samples at >0.25%. In contrast, these and other substitutions at NS3 positions 155, 156, and 168 were detected in 19/27 patients at day 2 (24 h) and 21/21 at day 4 (84 h) of monotherapy but not in placebo-treated patients. Based on the DRM growth kinetics during drug treatment, pretreated NS3 mutations at amino acids 155, 156, and 168 were estimated on average at 0.025% and 0.015% per genotype 1a and 1b HCV-infected patients, respectively. Relative fitness of the DRM viruses was shown to be significantly lower than the wild type. Deep-sequencing analyses of NS3 protease inhibitor-treated HCV-infected patients suggest a limit of HCV viral load suppression of 3.6 to 3.8 log(10) with NS3 protease inhibitor monotherapy that does not suppress the identified preexisting NS3 DRMs and thus a need for a combination therapy.