Apoptosis is an active process of cell death that serves diverse functions in multicellular organisms, and under physiological conditions it is tightly controlled. Apoptosis is often implicated in the elimination of cells whose survival might be harmful to the organism as a whole; for example, mechanisms have evolved to target virus-infected cells for apoptotic cell death. Infectious pancreatic necrosis virus (IPNV) is an economically important fish pathogen belonging to the Birnaviridae virus family. E1-S of IPNV Ab strain was isolated from the Japanese eel in Taiwan. In this review, we discuss that how IPNV-E1-S induces the CHSE-214 cells from the apoptotic features at the onset of pathology to postapoptotic necrosis. Then IPN virus infection and viral gene expression also has a linkage with the effect on either down-regulation of Mcl-1 or up-regulation of Bad gene expression in apoptotic host cell. This review may provide some insight into the control of IPNV replication.