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Two Americans and a Briton share the Nobel Prize for their work on the hepatitis C virus.
Everyone is talking about the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus, when the Swedish Nobel Prize Committee decided in an almost dialectical change to talk about another virus that has plagued people for much longer: the hepatitis C virus. liver and causes it to become inflamed. It’s called hepatitis. Until the 1980s, two forms of this were known: hepatitis A and hepatitis B. Both are caused by viruses, and vaccines against both have been available for a long time.
No A, no B
But in the 1980s, cases of overt hepatitis that could not be diagnosed as A or B. Tragically, there were many cases that appeared to have been caused by blood transfusion. The American physician Harvey J. Alter pointed out these cases with some scientific reluctance and consequently spoke of hepatitis not A not B. It soon became clear that a virus had to be responsible for this, and the experiments succeeded in infecting individuals of the species closer to humans, that is, chimpanzees, with this hepatitis through blood transfusions. For ethical reasons, these experiments are banned in Europe, unlike in the US Self-infected animals are not available – humans are currently the only known natural host for this virus. Of course, one wonders where it originally came from. Rodents are supposed to have jumped at us, maybe even another crown association! – of bats.
The new Nobel prizes
Harvey J. Alter He was born in New York in 1935. He would have loved to become a professional baseball player, but he wasn’t that gifted at it. He then studied medicine at the University of Rochester. He worked for the National Institutes of Health and Georgetown University, where he established a bank of blood donor samples. [ AFP ]
Michael HoughtonHe was born in England in 1949 as the son of a truck driver and studied biology at the University of East Anglia. he graduated from King’s College London in 1977. Among other things, he was at the Chiron Corporation and continues to be a professor of virology at the University of Alberta. A German colleague describes him as “extremely modest and trustworthy.” [ University of Alberta]
Charles M. Rice He was born in Sacramento in 1952. As a great dog lover, he first wanted to study veterinary medicine, but then he switched to biochemistry. She received her doctorate from the California Institute of Technology in 1981. She worked at the University of Washington School of Medicine and at Rockefeller University. He calls the hepatitis C virus a “persistent troublemaker.” [ AFP ]
In any case, British biochemist Michael Houghton, who was working at the Chiron pharmaceutical company at the time, isolated DNA fragments from the chimpanzee’s blood, which were apparently protein templates for the virus in question. But it turned out that this in itself does not carry its genetic information in the form of DNA, but of its versatile brother, RNA, that is, an RNA virus. One single-stranded with positive polarity and shell. By the way, it shares these three properties with coronaviruses, which, however, have much larger genomes and belong to a completely different class of RNA viruses.
It was called the hepatitis C virus (HCV) with captivating simplicity and the next question was: Can it trigger the disease on its own? This was demonstrated again in experiments with chimpanzees, the American virologist Charles M. Rice.
The virus is constantly mutating
Research by Alter, Houghton, and Rice formed the basis for the development of several drugs against this virus. This has one more thing in common with Sars-CoV-2: there is no vaccine against it. But the hope of developing one is significantly lower than with Covid-19. The hepatitis C virus has a polymerase (an enzyme used to replicate) that is very imprecise. That means it changes all the time. By doing so, it dodges the attacks of the immune system and causes a chronic infection. Worse still, like other viruses, including the hepatitis B virus and the herpes virus HHV-8, it can cause cancer. This is also the reason why HCV research is so urgent. Unfortunately, it is made more difficult by the fact that we have managed to place the sequence and structure of this virus under patent protection. Novartis currently holds the patents.
“Saved millions of lives”
Thanks to the numerous drugs, almost all with a name that ends in “vir”, such as ombitasvir or sofosbuvir, and that block certain enzymes of the virus, hepatitis C can now be fought quite well. The now award-winning researchers have “saved millions of lives,” says the Nobel Prize Committee. However, more than a million people die each year.
The fact that people are hearing more about hepatitis C in industrialized countries is also due to cultural factors: in addition to blood transfusions and drug injections, piercings and tattoos are good opportunities to become infected with the virus incredibly moody. In Germany, for example, HCV cases reported to the Robert Koch Institute increased slightly from 2010 to 2019, from 4,998 to 6,633 infections.
Of the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine were the two American researchers William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza and their British colleague Peter Ratcliffe last year. He was recognized for discovering the molecular mechanisms of oxygen uptake by cells.
The winners of the last ten years
2019: American cell researchers William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza and their British colleague Peter Ratcliffe received the coveted award for their discoveries on the question of how cells can measure and adapt to different amounts of oxygen.
2018: American researcher James Allison and Japanese scientist Tasuku Honjo share the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in recognition of their discoveries about the immune checkpoints that led to modern cancer immunotherapy.
2017: American researchers Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young for the investigation of the biological “internal clock” of organisms.
2016: The Japanese Yoshinori Ohsumi, who deciphered the vital protein recycling system in cells.
2015: Youyou Tu from China, who discovered the active ingredient artemisinin for malaria. He shared the award with Irish-born William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura of Japan, who had worked to fight other parasites.
2014: To the Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser, as well as John O’Keefe (US / Great Britain) for discovering the basic structures of the human sense of direction.
2013: Thomas Südhof (born in Germany), as well as James Rothman (USA) and Randy Schekman (USA) for the discovery of essential transport mechanisms in cells.
2012: The British John Gurdon and the Japanese Shinya Yamanaka for the reprogramming of adult body cells in embryonic cells.
2011: Bruce Beutler (USA) and Jules Hoffmann (France) for their work on alerting the innate immune system. Ralph Steinman from Canada discovered cells that activate the acquired immune system. He died shortly before the announcement and received the award posthumously.
2010: The British Robert Edwards for the development of test tube fertilization.
