A trio of virus hunters won the Nobel Prize for Hepatitis C discovery

Stockholm / Berlin (ANTARA) – Two Americans and a British person won the 2020 Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for identifying the Hepatitis C virus, in decades of work that has helped limit the spread of the deadly disease and develop anti-viral drugs to cure it. .

The discoveries of scientists Harvey Alter, Charles Rice and British citizen Michael Houghton mean there is an opportunity to eradicate the Hepatitis C virus, a goal the World Health Organization (WHO) aims to achieve in the next decade.

The three of them shared an award of 10 million Swedish kron (US $ 1.1 million) for finding evidence that a blood-borne virus can cause Hepatitis C, which afflicts more than 70 million people and causes about 400,000 deaths each year.

“This is enormous news, which will undoubtedly revive efforts to eliminate Hepatitis C as a global threat by 2030,” said Professor Gregory Dore, head of the Viral Hepatitis Clinical Research Program at Kirby Institute in Sydney, Australia.

Nominations for this year’s awards predate the global spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, but the winners’ choice recognizes the importance of identifying the virus as the first step in winning the battle against a new disease, said Thomas Perlmann, who is the Secretary General of the Nobel Assembly.

Perlmann said he managed to contact Alter and Rice earlier in their day in the United States. “They were very surprised, excited and speechless,” he told reporters.

This is the second Nobel Medicine Prize awarded for hepatitis research after Baruch Blumberg won in 1976 for the discovery that a form of blood-borne hepatitis is caused by a virus that has become known as Hepatitis B.Hepatitis A, which is easily treated, is transmitted through water or contaminated food.

“Before the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus, getting a blood transfusion was a little like a game Russian roulette, “said Nobel Committee member Nils-Goran Larsson, adding that millions of lives can now receive safe transfusions and blood products.

THREE STEPS

This joint award is given to research carried out in the 1960s when Alter, who worked at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), discovered that liver disease can be spread through blood transfusions that are not caused by Hepatitis A or B.

The team was led by Houghton, then working for the pharmaceutical company Chiron, which in the mid-1980s was able to create a new virus copy from fragments found in the blood of infected chimpanzees.

This virus, which belongs to the Flavivirus family, is named Hepatitis C. Identification of this virus has allowed the development of tests to filter blood bank supplies and greatly reduce the spread of disease, which can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer.

The final piece of the puzzle came when Rice, then at the University of Washington in the city of St Louis, was able to use genetic engineering to produce a version of the Hepatitis C virus and showed that the virus itself can cause symptoms in chimpanzees comparable to infection. in humans.

Alter is still affiliated with the NIH while Houghton is a professor of virology at the University of Alberta. Rice led the Rockefeller University Center for Hepatitis C Studies until 2018 and remains active.

While the Nobel Prize will go according to plan this year, it has been shaded by the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Nobel Foundation has canceled the traditional banquet, which is an important part of celebrations in December, and will distribute medals and diplomas on television shows, instead of live in Stockholm.

The field of medicine is the first Nobel Prize to be awarded annually. Awards for achievements in science, peace and literature have been awarded since 1901 and were created at the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.

Source: Reuters
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Translator: Aria Cindyara
Editor: Atman Ahdiat
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