Altimmune, Inc. announced results of its recently completed HepTcell Phase 1 clinical trial will be presented on April 12, 2019 at The International Liver Congress sponsored by The European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) being held in Vienna, AustriaApril 10-14, 2019. As previously announced, this study met its primary endpoint of safety and showed that HepTcell treatment was associated with increased HBV-specific cellular immune responses. These results will be presented by Mark Thursz, MB BS, MD, FRCP, Professor of Hepatology at Imperial College, London as an oral presentation in the session entitled, Hepatitis B – Drug Development. Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has infected more than 2 billion people worldwide. The majority of adults infected with HBV achieve spontaneous clearance via HBV-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells; however, more than 257 million people worldwide, of which 2 million patients are in the United States, remain chronically infected. HBV remains a leading cause of death globally due to complications such as cirrhosis, liver failure and hepatocellular carcinoma. Patients with chronic infection have profound defects in magnitude and quality of anti-HBV T-cell responses and breaking this immune tolerance is a key goal for all novel HBV treatment strategies. Altimmune’s HepTcell is a specific HBV immunotherapeutic designed to drive CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell responses against all HBV genotypes in patients of all ethnic backgrounds. HepTcell focuses the immune system on discrete highly conserved regions of the HBV proteome. HepTcell, a fully synthetic peptide product, is reconstituted with Valneva’s depot-forming IC31™ TLR9 adjuvant and given by intramuscular injection. The HepTcell Phase 1 study was a double-blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized, dose-escalation trial that enrolled 60 subjects with chronic hepatitis B who were HBeAg negative and well-controlled on licensed antivirals. Forty patients received one of two dose levels of HepTcell, with and without Valneva’s IC31 adjuvant, while twenty control patients received either placebo or IC31 alone. All patients received 3 injections 28 days apart, and were followed for 6 months after the final dose.