When Jessica and Brian Starkey of Leavenworth County were diagnosed with hepatitis C infections last year, they didn’t have insurance coverage for treatment. But Jessica’s doctor said there was still a chance they could get help. Researchers in Kansas City were enrolling hepatitis C patients in a national clinical trial. They offered powerful drug cocktails featuring a promising new experimental drug to kill the virus. And it was free. The drug, which went by the code name BMS-986094, was among a growing number of experimental antiviral medications being developed to treat hepatitis C, a liver-destroying virus that infects more than 3 million people in the United States and as many as 200 million worldwide.
