MMP8 and fibrosis: These include whether trans-complementation by wild-type HBV rather than a purposefully engineered helper construct would occur to practically useful levels, whether a truncated MMP-8, sufficiently small to fit into an HBV vector, would exert similarly positive effects against fibrosis and cirrhosis as full-length MMP-8, and whether such an HBV-vector could be shuttled into liver cells and express the transgene with similar efficiency as a conventional Ad-vector.