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The 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British scientist Michael Houghton for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. The announcement from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, was broadcast live on the Internet. The prize is SEK 10 million, approximately € 950,000. In recent years – explained a professor from the Committee – there have been an estimated 70 million cases of hepatitis C in the world with 400 thousand deaths a year. Hepatitis C is also one of the most common causes of liver transplants. Thanks to their discovery, highly sensitive blood tests for the virus are now available, and these have essentially eliminated post-transfusion hepatitis in many parts of the world, vastly improving global health, the committee said. Their discovery also enabled the rapid development of antiviral drugs targeting hepatitis C, he added. For the first time in history the disease can now be cured, giving hope for the eradication of the hepatitis C virus from the world population.
The Nobel Prize in Physics, the Prize in Chemistry (Wednesday), Literature (Thursday), Peace (Friday) and Economics (Monday of next week) will be awarded on Tuesday, October 6.
Who I am
Alter, 85, was born in 1935 in New York and graduated from the University of Rochester, where he continued to work for a period and then moved to Seattle. From 1961 he worked for the National Institutes of Health (Nih), except for a brief period when he worked at Georgetown University. Alter, with his research on transfusion-associated hepatitis, showed that an unknown virus was a common cause of chronic hepatitis.
Rice (65) was born in 1952 in Sacramento and graduated in 1981 from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Since 1986 he has served at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. Since 2001 he has been teaching at the Rockefeller University in New York, where until 2018 he directed the Center for Hepatitis C Research. Rice has provided the definitive evidence showing that this virus can only cause hepatitis.
British Houghton graduated in 1977 from King’s College London and later worked for GD Searle & Company and Chiron. Since 2010 she has taught at the University of Alberta. Houghton used a new strategy to isolate the genome of the new virus, called the hepatitis C virus.
Last year
Last year the prestigious award went to the Americans William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza and the British Peter Ratcliffe for discovering the mechanism by which cells adapt to oxygen availability, paving the way for the understanding of many diseases, such as anemia. and Tumors. The three honorees laid the foundation for our understanding of how oxygen levels affect cell metabolism and physiological function – explained the Nobel jury -. Their findings have paved the way for promising new strategies to combat anemia, cancer, and many other diseases.
October 5, 2020 (change October 5, 2020 | 12:12)
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