Hepatitis C discoveries win 2020 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine
Identification of the virus dramatically reduced infections through blood transfusions
Updated
Three virologists have won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus.
Harvey Alter, of the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., Michael Houghton, who is now at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and Charles Rice, now of The Rockefeller University in New York City, will split the prize of 10 million Swedish kronor, or more than $1.1 million, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute announced October 5.
About 71 million people worldwide have chronic hepatitis C infections. An estimated 400,000 people die each year of complications from the disease, which include cirrhosis and liver cancer. Today, the major way people get infected is through contaminated needles used for injecting intravenous drugs, but when the researchers made their discoveries in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, blood transfusions were an important source of hepatitis C infection.
“This is a bit overdue,” says Dennis Brown, chief science officer of the American Physiological Society. It often takes decades before scientific achievements are recognized by the Nobel committee. One reason for the recognition this year may be COVID-19, Brown says. “This keeps virology and viruses in the public eye,” he says. “It might be a push to put science at the forefront, to say when we put money into this and when we have well-funded people working on these viruses, we can actually do something about them.”
Alter worked at a large blood bank at NIH in the 1960s when hepatitis B was discovered. (That discovery won the 1976 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine (SN: 10/23/76).) Blood could be screened so that people wouldn’t get that virus from a transfusion, but patients were still developing hepatitis. Alter and colleagues showed in the mid- and late 1970s that a new virus, dubbed “non-A, non-B” was causing the infection, and that the virus could be used to transmit the disease to chimpanzees (SN: 4/1/78).
Just over a decade later, Houghton, working at the pharmaceutical company Chiron Corp. (now part of Novartis), developed a way to pull fragments of the virus’s genetic material from the blood of infected chimpanzees and developed a test to screen out hepatitis C-infected blood (SN: 5/14/88) . It took so long to isolate the virus’s genetic material because Houghton “had to wait until the technology was available,” Brown says.