Two Americans and a Briton won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus. The award to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles M. Rice was announced on Monday, October 5, 2020. Read story here.
Hepatitis C is a slow-acting viral infection spread by blood transfusions, needles, or unsterile medical equipment that attacks the liver, leading to complications that kill roughly half a million people a year, primarily in Africa and Asia. In the United States, it spreads primarily by drug users using contaminated needles.
Wikipedia describes the discovery of hepatitis C as follows:
In the mid-1970s, Harvey J. Alter, Chief of the Infectious Disease Section in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, and his research team demonstrated how most post-transfusion hepatitis cases were not due to hepatitis A or B viruses. Despite this discovery, international research efforts to identify the virus, initially called non-A, non-B hepatitis (NANBH), failed for the next decade. In 1987, Michael Houghton, Qui-Lim Choo, and George Kuo at Chiron Corporation, collaborating with Daniel W. Bradley at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, used a novel molecular cloning approach to identify the unknown organism and develop a diagnostic test. In 1988, Alter confirmed the virus by verifying its presence in a panel of NANBH specimens. In April 1989, the discovery of HCV was published in two articles in the journal Science. The discovery led to significant improvements in diagnosis and improved antiviral treatment. In 2000, Drs. Alter and Houghton were honored with the Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research for “pioneering work leading to the discovery of the virus that causes hepatitis C and the development of screening methods that reduced the risk of blood transfusion-associated hepatitis in the U.S. from 30% in 1970 to virtually zero in 2000.”
and Dr. Rice’s role as follows:
Rice … received his PhD in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, where he studied RNA viruses …. While at Caltech, he was involved in researching the genome of the Sindbis virus and the establishment of flaviviruses as their own family of viruses. The strain of yellow fever virus he used for this work was eventually used for the development of the yellow fever vaccine. This led him to his work in the related hepatitis C virus for which he has won many awards. … He was the editor of Journal of Experimental Medicine from 2003 to 2007, Journal of Virology from 2003 to 2008, and PLoS Pathogens from 2005 to present. He has been an author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications.
Currently, there is no vaccine for hepatitis C, but treatment drugs have been developed with high cure rates, although their high cost limits access to them.