On Aug. 27, 2020, Assembly Biosciences and Arbutus Biopharma announced that the companies have entered into a clinical collaboration agreement to evaluate Assembly’s lead hepatitis B virus (HBV) core inhibitor candidate ABI-H0731 in combination with Arbutus’ proprietary GalNAc delivered RNAi therapeutic AB-729 and standard-of-care nucleos(t)ide reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NrtI) therapy for the treatment of patients with chronic HBV infection.