PhD defence G. (Gülce) Sarı

Dissertation in short:

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) infections are the major cause of acute hepatitis worldwide with more than 3 million symptomatic cases and around 60000 fatalities. Whilst HEV infections can cause both acute and chronic infections, acute HEV cases are largely connected to outbreaks in developing countries which vary in size, but sporadically are recognized in western countries. Differently, chronic HEV infections are common in developed countries, and affect patients with an immunocompromised status, such as patients who received a solid organ transplant, or human immunodeficiency virus infection. The limitations of the model systems, the molecular biology of HEV being incompletely undeciphered and the unavailability of specific antiviral compounds hamper the fight to control HEV.

Here in this thesis, we showed that human liver chimeric mice have an undeniable role in increasing our understanding of human viruses and diseases such as HEV infections. As scientists, we all should strive for excellence; a good design, an adequate model and all the necessary controls to obtain repeatable and universal results. We believe that our model organism optimization studies are of great importance in liver research. Our work expanded the knowledge on HEV biology, and anti-HEV treatment strategies and further studies are required to test whether obtained data can be translated into clinical studies.