Recently, researchers from Department of Infectious Diseases of the First Affiliated Hospital (FAH) of Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) published an original article entitled "Real-world clinical data-driven modelling on the initiation time of antiviral prophylaxis among pregnant women with chronic hepatitis B infection" in Journal of Hepatology (impact factor: 26.8). Professor Chen Tianyan from Department of Infectious Diseases is the last corresponding author.

In this study, the real-world clinical data of 4832 pregnant women with chronic hepatitis B infection admitted to Department of Infectious Diseases of FAH from 2010 to 2020 were collected. After data screening and inclusion and exclusion criteria, 328 pregnant women with chronic hepatitis B treated with telbivudine (LdT) or tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) were selected for modeling. By introducing the modeling idea of virus dynamics in the field of biomathematics, a simple mathematical model was proposed to describe dynamic changing trend of HBV DNA level in each pregnant woman after receiving antiviral treatment during pregnancy, and an intuitive explicit expression formula was given to calculate the time needed for viral load to reach this reduce this threshold value (5.3 log10 IU/mL) where the risk of mother-to-child transmission can be considered negligible (0.04%). Further population analysis calculated the latest gestational week to initiate antiviral treatment during pregnancy.

Journal of Hepatology mainly publishes clinical and basic research related to liver diseases, and rarely publishes modeling-related research. Interestingly, however,the modeling findings of this study received unanimous recognition by three editors and four peer-reviewers.

Professor Chen Tianyan from Department of Infectious Diseases of FAH is the corresponding author, Associate Professor Shen Mingwang from School of Public Health of XJTU is the first and corresponding author, PhD students He Shihao, Yao Naijuan and Li Rui are the co-first authors, and Professor Zhang Lei and Professor Chen Tianyan (FAH) are the co-corresponding authors of this study. This research is financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China and National Key Research & Development Program, etc.