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The winners were announced at a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
The three scientists who discovered the hepatitis C virus won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
The winners are the British scientist Michael Hutton and the two American researchers Harvey Alter and Charles Rice.
The Nobel Prize Committee said his discoveries ultimately “saved the lives of millions of people.”
The hepatitis C virus is a common cause of liver cancer and one of the leading causes of people needing a liver transplant.
In the 1960s, there was great concern that people who received donated blood transfusions developed chronic hepatitis. This was considered a mysterious disease.
The Nobel Prize Committee said that blood transfusion at the time was like the game of death known as “Russian Roulette”.
Highly sensitive blood tests on packages shipped to patients indicate that these cases have now been eliminated in many parts of the world. Effective antiviral drugs have also been developed.
“For the first time in history, chronic hepatitis can now be cured, raising hope that the hepatitis C virus can be eliminated from the world,” the award committee said.
Yet 70 million people around the world carry the virus, which still kills about 400,000 people a year.
Mysterious killer
Hepatitis A and B viruses were discovered in the mid-1960s.
But Professor Harvey Alter, while studying transfusion patients at the US National Institutes of Health in 1972, discovered that there was another mysterious infection.
The patients were still sick after receiving donated blood.
He explained that blood transfusions from infected people to chimpanzees led the monkeys to become infected with the disease.
The mysterious disease was known at the time as “not A and not B” and research continued to find out more about this disease.
And Professor Michael Hutton, while working at the Chiron Pharmaceutical Company, was able to isolate the genetic code of the virus in 1989. This proved that it was a yellowish type of virus and called it hepatitis C.
Professor Charles Rice, while at Washington University in St. Louis, put the finishing touches in 1997. He injected the hepatitis C virus into the chimpanzee’s liver and showed that it could cause hepatitis.
Professor Thomas Perelman, secretary general of the Nobel Society, said he was only able to communicate with Professor Alter and Rice and inform them of the news.
“They were definitely not sitting by the phone because I called them twice before and there was no answer … But as soon as I got to them, they were very surprised, but they felt very happy and hardly able to speak, so it was very fun talking to them, “he added.
Previous award winners
2019 – Sir Peter Ratcliffe, William Caillen and Greg Seminza win for discovering how cells feel and adapt to oxygen levels.
2018 – James P. Allison and Tasuko Honjo win for discovering how to fight cancer using the body’s immune system.
2017 – Geoffrey Hall, Michael Rusbach and Michael Young win for revealing how bodies maintain a circadian rhythm, or body clock.
2016 – Yoshinori Osumi wins for discovering how cells can stay healthy by recycling waste.
2015 – William C. Campbell, Satoshi Omura and Yoyo Tu win deworming drug discoveries.
2014 – John O’Keefe, May Brett Moser, and Edward Moser win for their discovery of the brain’s navigation system.
