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The announcement was made at a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
Three scientists who discovered the hepatitis C virus have won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.
The winners are British scientist Michael Houghton and American researchers Harvey Alter and Charles Rice.
The Nobel Prize committee said his discoveries ultimately “saved millions of lives.”
The virus is a common cause of liver cancer and one of the main reasons people need a liver transplant.
In the 1960s, there was a great concern that people who received donated blood would contract chronic hepatitis (inflammation of the liver) from a mysterious and unknown disease.
The Nobel Prize committee said that a blood transfusion at the time was like “Russian roulette.”
Highly sensitive blood tests mean that these cases have now been eliminated in many parts of the world, and effective antiviral drugs have also been developed.
“For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating the hepatitis C virus from the world,” the award committee said.
However, the virus still infects 70 million people a year and kills about 400,000.
The Mysterious Killer
The Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B viruses had been discovered in the mid-1960s.
But Professor Harvey Alter, while studying transfusion patients at the US National Institutes of Health in 1972, showed that there was another mysterious infection at work.
Patients were still getting sick after receiving donated blood.
He showed that donating blood from infected patients to chimpanzees led them to develop the disease.
The mysterious disease became known as “not A, not B” hepatitis in and the search was now on.
Professor Michael Houghton, while working at the Chiron pharmaceutical company, managed to isolate the genetic sequence of the virus in 1989. This proved that it was a type of flavivirus and was called Hepatitis C.
And Professor Charles Rice, while at Washington University in St. Louis, applied the finishing touches in 1997. He injected a genetically modified hepatitis C virus into the liver of chimpanzees and showed that this could cause hepatitis.
Professor Thomas Perlmann, secretary general of the Nobel Assembly, said he could only contact Professors Alter and Rice to give them news.
“They definitely weren’t sitting by the phone because I called them a couple of times before with no answer.
“But once I caught up with them, they were very surprised and very happy and almost speechless, so it was a lot of fun talking to them.”
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Previous winners
- 2019 – Sir Peter Ratcliffe, William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza for discovering how cells perceive and adapt to oxygen levels
- 2018 – James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for discovering how to fight cancer using the body’s immune system.
- 2017- Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young for unraveling how bodies maintain a circadian rhythm or a body clock
- 2016 – Yoshinori Ohsumi for discovering how cells stay healthy by recycling waste
- 2015 – William C Campbell, Satoshi Ōmura and Youyou Tu for discoveries of antiparasitic drugs
- 2014 – John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for discovering the brain’s navigation system
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