For three to four million Americans infected with hepatitis C, a treatment breakthrough announced this week could be life-saving — a triumph of modern medical research.

In the next few weeks, new drugs will start coming on the market that will cure most patients with an eight-week oral regimen that has few side effects, according to a New York Times report published in The Bulletin Tuesday. It will replace current treatment that cures only 70 percent of patients and requires months of injections with brutal side effects.

As treatment goes beyond early trials, researchers will learn more about the drugs’ efficacy and possible side effects, but optimism is high that the latest developments will cure hepatitis C patients.

The disease, which destroys the liver, is spread by needle sharing and unprotected sex, as well as by transfusions received before blood testing began in 1992. It can take decades to cause symptoms, so many of those with the disease don’t know they have it, prompting recent recommendations to expand screening, especially for baby boomers.

Additional screening presents some troublesome treatment questions, because many infected people never develop liver damage and tests can’t tell who will. The current treatments have side effects so severe, including anemia and depression, that some patients go without unless later tests show serious liver deterioration. Those patients might be more inclined to take the new oral treatments, but they are expensive: likely $60,000 to $100,000 for each patient.

For a patient whose liver is being destroyed, though, this breakthrough couldn’t come soon enough. The Times quoted Floridian Dr. Arthur Rubens, who had tried many treatments, suffered severe side effects and is now virus free after participating in a trial of the new treatments. He spoke of his appreciation for “the magnitude of this gift.”

Such gifts are the result of a vibrant research community that operates in public and private institutions, paid for by grants and by industry profits. It needs protection from the kinds of price controls and additional taxes favored to pay for health reform.