Nobel Prize in Medicine, prize for scientists who “discovered the hepatitis C virus”



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Awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. The prestigious award went to Harvey J. Alter, Mchael Houghton, and Charles M. Rice. To the three scientists, the credit for having “discovered the hepatitis C virus.” The announcement was made live on the Internet and on social media, as is traditional at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

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WHO I AM These are two Americans and an Englishman who, according to the explanations: “They have made a decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis. A serious global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer in people around the world ”.

Studies and research by Alter, Houghton and Rice have led to the identification of a new virus, hepatitis C virus (Hcv). Before them, “the discovery of the hepatitis A and B viruses had been a fundamental step forward, we still read, but most cases of blood-borne hepatitis remain unexplained. The discovery of the hepatitis C virus revealed the cause of the remaining cases of chronic hepatitis and made it possible to perform blood tests and the development of new drugs, capable of saving millions of lives. Thanks to similar studies, the hepatitis C virus “can now be cured” for the first time.

Specifically, Alter, with research on transfusion-associated hepatitis, showed that the unknown virus was a common cause of chronic hepatitis. Houghton used a novel strategy to isolate the genome of the new virus, precisely defined as hepatitis C. Rice, finally, provided definitive evidence that the new virus alone is capable of causing hepatitis.

Nobel Prize in Medicine, the award given to scientists who discovered the hepatitis C virus

Harvey J. Alter is 85 years old, he was born in 1935 in New York. A graduate of the University of Rochester, he worked there before moving to Seattle. Beginning in 1961, except for a time when he was at Georgetown University, he worked for the National Institutes of Health (Nih). Almost twenty years younger than Rice, born 1952 in Sacramento. In 1981, the virologist graduated 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 a professor at the Rockefeller University in New York, where he directed the research center on hepatitis C until 2018. The British Houghton, finally, graduated in 1977 from King’s College London and later worked for GD companies. Searle & Company and Chiron. Since 2019 he has taught at the University of Alberta.

In addition to the great prestige, the Nobel Prize is worth 950 thousand euros, about 10 million Swedish crowns

Last updated: 12:47


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