Gene Therapy for HBV superior to  antivirals alone due to its...

Gene Therapy for HBV superior to  antivirals alone due to its "Overlapping nature"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2217617/

"Potent knockdown of a gene of interest with high sequence specificity makes RNAi a powerful tool for studying gene function and may be used for treating a variety of diseases. RNAi can specially inhibit the function of any chosen target genes and has shown antiviral effect against hepatitis B and C virus (HBV, HCV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (12–15). Unlike HCV and HIV, there is only modest sequence heterogeneity among HBV DNA strains. Thus, HBV makes extensive use of overlapping reading frames (ORFs) with the DNA genome, suggesting the multiple HBV RNAs will make the virus susceptible for RNA interference (16,17)."