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This year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to three researchers who have taken decisive steps in the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, one of our biggest global health problems.
The disease causes chronic liver damage and liver cancer in people around the world.
The discovery, which was made in the 1980s, has led to treatments that cure previously chronically ill people with hepatitis C.
—Today we have a cure for this virus and we can cure 95 percent of all people who contract the virus in three months. This is a big change compared to the beginning, when our treatments were much more toxic and only five percent were cured, says Charles Rice, one of the Nobel laureates in a video of Rockefeller University.
Sneaky disease
Hepatitis is estimated to kill more than one million people a year. Hepatitis B and C are especially insidious because you can be apparently healthy for many years before actually getting sick. This means that those who are healthy and can transmit the disease are really dangerous in society, says Maria Mascucci, professor of virology at the Karolinska Institutet, to SVT reporter Linus Brohult.
WHO estimates that hepatitis C affects 70 million people worldwide and causes 400,000 deaths each year.
—There may be very nonspecific symptoms such as muscle aches and liver pain. In some cases, you may have mild jaundice. 25 percent face the acute phase. But 75 percent contract a chronic infection that leads to cirrhosis of the liver and then, ultimately, greatly increases the risk of liver cancer, says Olle Kämpe, a member of the Nobel Committee.
“All people who received a blood transfusion before 1992 should be tested for antibodies to hepatitis C,” says Olle Kämpe.
secondbroke out in the 70s
Harvey Alter began research for which he now receives an award from the National Institutes of Health in the United States, where he studied hepatitis in patients who received a blood transfusion.
Harvey Alter and several other researchers found that an alarming number of patients treated with blood transfusions developed hepatitis as a result of an unknown infection. Alter and his colleagues showed that blood from diseased individuals could transmit the infection to chimpanzees, the only susceptible host animal other than humans.
Other studies also showed that the infectious agent appeared to have properties found in viruses.
Houghton and Rice took the investigation further
Michael Houghton conducted the research to identify and map the DNA of the then unknown virus for more than 10 years.
Charles Rice’s research, in turn, focused on the question “Can this virus by itself cause hepatitis?” By injecting the virus into the liver of chimpanzees, it could be observed that they had the same symptoms as patients with hepatitis.
Thus, the results showed that the hepatitis C virus met the criteria to be the only infectious agent causing cases of liver disease after blood transfusions.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced tomorrow and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday.
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