RESEARCH ARTICLE Lethal Mutagenesis of Hepatitis C Virus Induced by Favipiravir Ana I. de AÂ vila1, Isabel Gallego1,2, Maria Eugenia Soria3, Josep Gregori2,3,4, Josep Quer2,3,5, Juan Ignacio Esteban2,3,5, Charles M. Rice6, Esteban Domingo1,2*, Celia Perales1,2,3* 1 Centro de BiologõÂa Molecular ªSevero Ochoaº (CSIC-UAM), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones CientõÂficas (CSIC), Campus de Cantoblanco, 28049, Madrid, Spain, 2 Centro de InvestigacioÂn BiomeÂdica en Red de Enfermedades HepaÂticas y Digestivas (CIBERehd), Barcelona, Spain, 3 Liver Unit, Internal Medicine, Laboratory of Malalties Hepàtiques, Vall d'Hebron Institut de Recerca-Hospital Universitari Vall d a11111 ÂHebron, (VHIR-HUVH), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08035, Barcelona, Spain, 4 Roche Diagnostics, S.L., Sant Cugat del ValleÂs, Spain, 5 Universitat AutoÂnoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 6 Center for the Study of Hepatitis C, Laboratory of Virology and Infectious Disease, The Rockefeller University, New York, United States of America *
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[email protected] (CP) OPEN ACCESS Abstract Citation: de AÂvila AI, Gallego I, Soria ME, Gregori J, Quer J, Esteban JI, et al. (2016) Lethal Lethal mutagenesis is an antiviral approach that consists in extinguishing a virus by an Mutagenesis of Hepatitis C Virus Induced by excess of mutations acquired during replication in the presence of a mutagen. Here we Favipiravir. PLoS ONE 11(10): e0164691. show that favipiravir (T-705) is a potent mutagenic agent for hepatitis C virus (HCV) during doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0164691 its replication in human hepatoma cells. T-705 leads to an excess of G ! A and C ! U tran- Editor: Ming-Lung Yu, Kaohsiung Medical sitions in the mutant spectrum of preextinction HCV populations.