Liver Transplant Outcomes Improving for US Patients With HIV/HCV

While liver transplant outcomes were historically poor in people coinfected with HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV), they have improved significantly in the era of direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy, a recent analysis of U.S. organ transplant data showed.

The availability of highly potent DAA therapy should change how transplant specialists view patients coinfected with HIV/HCV who need a liver transplant, according to researcher Jennifer Wang, MD, chief gastroenterology fellow at the University of Chicago, who presented the results of the analysis at the annual Digestive Disease Week® (DDW). Cumulative graft survival rates since the introduction of DAAs are comparable between transplant recipients with HIV/HCV coinfection and recipients who are both HIV and HCV negative, according to the study.

“Having hepatitis C no longer confers worse patient survival in the DAA era, and this is the main takeaway from our study,” Wang said.

The study also showed that the number of liver transplants among HIV-infected patients has increased over the past 4-5 years. However, the absolute number remains low at 64 cases in 2019, or less than 1% of all liver transplants that year, and only about one-third of those HIV-positive recipients had HCV coinfection, according to Wang.

Moreover, relatively few centers are performing liver transplants for patients who are HIV/HCV coinfected, and there is significant geographic variation in where the procedures are done, she said in her presentation.

Reassuring Data That Should Prompt Referral

Taken together, these results should offer reassurance to transplant centers that patients coinfected with HIV/HCV are no longer at increased risk for poor outcomes after transplantation, said Christine M. Durand, MD, associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

“The additional call for action should be beyond the transplantation community to ensure that referrals for liver transplant are where they should be,” Durand said in an interview.

“With a number of only 64 transplants a year, we’re not doing enough, and there are more patients that could benefit from liver transplants,” added Durand, who is principal investigator of HOPE in Action, a prospective, multicenter, clinical trial evaluating the safety and survival outcomes of HIV-positive deceased donor liver transplants in HIV-positive recipients.

Impact of the HOPE Act

Liver transplantation for HIV-positive patients has increased since the signing of the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act in 2013, according to Wang.

The HOPE act expanded the donor pool to include HIV-positive deceased donors, which not only increased the donor supply overall, but specifically helped HIV-positive individuals, who experience a higher rate of waiting-list mortality, according to a review on the topic authored by Durand and coauthors.

However, some transplant centers may be reluctant to do liver transplants in HIV-positive patients coinfected with HCV. That’s because, in previous studies that were conducted before the DAA era, outcomes after liver transplant in HIV/HCV-coinfected patients were inferior to those in patients with HIV but no HCV infection, Wang said.

Accordingly, Wang and colleagues analyzed Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) data on adult patients who underwent liver transplants between 2008 and 2019 to see if the introduction of DAAs had leveled the playing field for those with HCV coinfection.

Progress in a Still-Underserved Population

The practice of liver transplant in the HIV population has been increasing since the HOPE Act, according to Wang.

Overall, out of 70,125 liver transplant recipients over the 2008-2019 period, 416 (0.6%) were HIV infected, the data show.

In 2014, 28 liver transplants (0.5%) were performed in HIV-infected individuals, which increased to 64 transplants (0.8%) in 2019, data show. Of those 64 HIV-positive liver transplant recipients in 2019, 23 (35.9%) were coinfected with HCV.

Graft survival has greatly improved, from a 3-year survival of only 58% in patients transplanted before the availability of DAAs to 82% in the DAA era, a difference that was statistically significant, Wang said.

In the DAA era, there was no significant difference in graft failure outcomes when comparing HIV/HCV-coinfected recipients with uninfected recipients, she added.

The largest proportion of liver transplantations in HIV/HCV-coinfected recipients have been done in OPTN Region 9 (New York), both in the pre- and post-DAA eras, according to Wang. Several regions have very low numbers or have performed no liver transplants in HIV/HCV-coinfected patients in either era.

“The number of transplant centers participating in liver transplant for coinfected patients is still quite low, so this is a very underserved patient population,” Wang said.

Wang provided no financial disclosures related to the research. Durand receives grants to the institution from Abbvie and GlaxoSmithKline and she receives honoraria from Gilead Sciences for serving on a grant review committee.

This article originally appeared on GI & Hepatology News, the official newspaper of the AGA Institute.

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