Although the best treatment choice for chronic hepatitis B is not clarified yet, certain therapeutic concepts could be derived from the experience of treating patients with chronic hepatitis C. A major advancement in treating hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection has been the development of combination therapy with IFN and ribavirin. IFN monotherapy is limited by poor sustained virologic responses, even when higher doses of IFN are used. IFN plus ribavirin combination therapy, in contrast, results in much improved treatment outcomes. In our previous study and others, sustained remission rate after cessation of therapy were significantly higher in patients receiving combination therapy than those receiving IFN alone. Therefore, combination therapy with IFN and ribavirin has been recommended as the standard treatment regimen for chronic hepatitis C. Furthermore, we have used ribavirin and IFN combination for the treatment of dual chronic hepatitis B and C, and the results also revealed that the efficacy of clearing HCV RNA was not affected by the presence of HBV infection. Interestingly, after a little more than 2-year post-treatment follow-up, we found that a significant portion (21%) of the responsive patients also cleared HBsAg. These findings imply that this combination regimen might be also effective for the control of chronic hepatitis B. We thus conducted a randomized, multi-center, placebo-controlled study in patients with HBeAg-positive chronic hepatitis B.