Table 1.

Factors involved in the early steps of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) replication cycle and their inhibitors.

Step	Protein	Function	Inhibitor
Liver transport	Apolipoprotein E (ApoE)	Liver directed transport along the lipoprotein remnant pathway [13]	None available
Hepatocyte attachment	Heparan sulfate proteoglycans (glypican 5)	Low-affinity attachment of the antigenic loop of both the S protein domain a well as the PreS1 of the L protein [7,14,15]	Synthetic anti-lipopolysaccharide peptides (SALPs) [16]
Receptor binding	Sodium taurocholate co-transporting polypeptide (NTCP)	Hepatocyte-specific HBV take-over through high-affinity binding of the PreS1 domain [17]	Myrcludex B [18], ezetimibe [19], cyclosporin A [20] and derivates [21,22], ibersartan [23], ritonavir [24], rosiglitazone [25], zafirlukast [25], triax [25], sulfasalazine [25], troglitazone [26] and vanitaracin A [27]
Entry	Epidermal growthfactor receptor (EGFR)	Binding of the HBV-NTCP complex and initiation of endocytosis [28]	Gefitinib [28] and erlotinib [29]
Endocytosis	Clathrin and dynamin	Clathrin-mediated endocytosis of the HBV-NTCP-EGFR complex [30,28]	Pitstop-2 [30] and dynasore [31]