Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection remains a major public health problem worldwide, with three hundred million chronic carriers of the virus, and its serious clinical consequences include liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (19). Unfortunately, alpha interferon therapy induces a sustained antiviral response in only 20 to 30% of the patients (12). The development of new nucleoside analogs, such as -L(Ϫ)-2Ј,3Ј-dideoxy-3Ј-thiacytidine [L(Ϫ)SddC or 3TC or lamivudine] that exhibit a potent inhibitory effect on HBV reverse transcriptase activity and viral replication in vitro (2, 6, 31), has opened new avenues in the antiviral therapy of chronic hepatitis B. Results of phase II and phase III clinical trials have shown that administration of lamivudine results in a dramatic suppression of viral replication which is accompanied by an improvement in liver histology (16,27,44). However, because of the relatively low rate of anti-HBe seroconversion and of the special features of the viral kinetics, long-term therapy with a nucleoside analog is required to eradicate viral infection (16,28). Indeed, chronic HBV infection is characterized by a high rate of virus production, by the absence of a cytopathogenic effect (and therefore a long half-life of infected hepatocytes), and by the persistence of viral genomes as a covalently closed circular DNA (CCC DNA) in the nucleus of infected cells (9,26,28,36,40). Because of the spontaneous error rate of the viral reverse transcriptase, prolonged administration of a single nucleoside analog in chronically infected patients may select for the replication of resistant viral strains. The rate of selection of resistant mutants is 23% after 1 year of lamivudine treatment and increases to 38% at the end of the second year of therapy (16). The same observation has been made with long-term treatment with famciclovir, another inhibitor of HBV polymerase, and it was demonstrated that the resistant viruses harbor mutations in conserved domains of the viral reverse transcriptase (29,44).In order to design new strategies that combine several antiviral agents with different mechanisms of action to prevent the emergence of resistant strains, the development of new inhibitors of HBV replication is required (44). In the search for new potent antiviral agents, 2Ј,3Ј-dideoxy-2Ј,3Ј-didehydro--L-5-fluorocytidine (-L-Fd4C) was found to exhibit a potent antiviral activity against human immunodeficiency virus and HBV replication in tissue culture (7,23). -L-Fd4C was found to be at least 10 times more potent (50% inhibitory concentration [IC 50 ] at 1 nM) than lamivudine (IC 50 at 15 nM) on HBV DNA synthesis in the hepatoma cell line HepG2 2.2.15, and its triphosphate derivative specifically inhibited the virion associated HBV DNA polymerase activity (41). Detailed analysis of the intracellular metabolism of -L-Fd4C revealed that the degree of phosphorylation and retention time of the triphosphate metabolites were higher than for lamivudine which may explain, at least in part, both the m...