Hepatitis C virus infection is the main cause of chronic liver disease, such as cirrhosis and liver cancer which infected around 71 million people around the world. The current standard of hepatitis C virus treatment has been highly developed and revealed the level of Sustained Virological Response (SVR) > 90%. However, the emerge of resistance issue, side effects and the high cost of treatment also need to be considered. Therefore, it is necessary to develop safe, inexpensive and more effective drug therapy for hepatitis C virus infection. In this study, we conducted an anti-hepatitis C activity test from the ethanol extract of Phyllanthus niruri L by in vitro culture cells using Huh7it cells. Our result was obtained anti-HCV activity with 50% inhibition concentration (IC₅₀) of P. niruri L.: 6.2 ± 0.6 µg/ml.  Further analysis was demonstrated the higher activity of extract in the entry step rather than post entry step of HCV life cycle. However, we obtained a potentiated effect of extract to the simeprevir, an NS3 protease inhibitor, more than twice higher. The addition of 25 µg/ml P. niruri extract induced the anti-HCV activity. Dose dependent concentrations of simeprevir and P. niruri extract in combination treatment resulted a Combination Index (CI) value < 1 (0.865) which indicated a synergistic effect. To ensure the safety of all samples, a toxicity test was conducted and the results obtained that all of the samples were not toxic as indicated by the percentage of cell viability > 95%. These results concluded that the P. niruri L. extract can be a strong candidate in dealing with the problem of hepatitis C virus infection.

Keyword : Phyllanthus niruri L., anti-hepatitis C virus, combination, simeprevir.