Supporting Information Figure S1 T cell responses to individual peptides from acute HBV patients. Acute HBV patients were stimulated in vitro with 15mer overlapping peptides covering the entire HBV proteome for http://www.selleckchem.com/products/ganetespib-sta-9090.html 10 d and screened for HBV specific T cell responses using 2 dimensional IFN-�� Elispot. Short-term lines were stimulated with 5 ��g/ml of each individual peptide identified from the IFN-�� elispot for 5 h and screened using intracellular cytokine staining or CD107a degranulation assay to confirm individual peptide responses. Remaining cells from the 10 d culture were stimulated overnight with confirmed peptides and supernatants were harvested to screen for CXCL-8 production in figure 3B. (TIF) Click here for additional data file.(158K, tif) Footnotes Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Funding: Work was funded by the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR; http://www.a-star.edu.sg/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection remains a major public health problem worldwide with approximately 2 billion people having been infected and 350 million of these patients becoming chronic carriers [1]. HBV infection is endemic in Taiwan and the carrier rate of HBsAg in general population has been as high as 15�C20% before initiation of the vaccination program. Infection of HBV is associated with a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations, ranging from acute or fulminant hepatitis to various forms of chronic diseases, including asymptomatic carriers, chronic hepatitis, liver cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) [1], [2].

Since the first successful human liver transplantation (LT) in 1963 by Starzl et al [3], LT has become the treatment of choice in eligible patients with hepatic failure or early HCC in many medical centers. However, the results of early experience with LT for HBV related diseases were unsatisfactory in the 1980s, as majority of patients developed recurrent HBV infection in the early post-LT period, leading to loss of the allograft with reduced patient survival [4], [5]. Patients with active viral replication prior to transplantation are particularly at risk of hepatitis B relapse. On the other hand, in patients harboring a lower viral load prior to LT, a favorable long-term outcome is generally expected.

This observation led to an effective strategy to improve LT outcome through reduction of pre-transplantation HBV viral load [6]. The clinical outcomes of patients as well as graft survivals in HBV LT recipients have been dramatically improved with the Entinostat introduction of long-term hepatitis B immune globulin (HBIG) therapy and the availability of highly effective antiviral agents such as lamivudine (LAM) and adefovir dipivoxil [7].