Three doctors were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Psychology or Medicine for their work in the discovery of the hepatitis C virus.
The Nobel Assembly announced Monday that Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles Rice were each awarded a one-third share of 2020’s prize for medicine for making a “decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer in people around the world,” according to the organization’s press release.
“This has been a virus that has been a plague […] affecting millions of people — and still is, unfortunately,” said professor Thomas Perlmann, a member of the Nobel Assembly.
For the first time in history, the Hepatitis C virus can now be cured. The 2020 Medicine Laureates’ discoveries revealed the cause of the remaining cases of chronic hepatitis and made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives.#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/hqJK1uWX3u
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2020
The scientists were not part of a single team but were each recognized for contributing to key advancements in the identification of the virus over the course of several decades.
According to the Nobel Assembly, in the 1960s and 1970s, Alter “worryingly demonstrated that a large number” of hepatitis cases persisted after blood transfusions that had been tested for hepatitis A and B. A decade later, Houghton “undertook the arduous work needed to isolate the genetic sequence of the virus,” which eventually led to the identification of the hepatitis C virus.
But it wasn’t until the 1990s that Rice published “the final proof that hepatitis C virus alone could cause the unexplained cases of transfusion-mediated hepatitis.”
The World Health Organization estimates that 71 million people around the world are infected with hepatitis C. The virus can lead to cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer. The WHO estimates that 399,000 people died from hepatitis C in 2016.
“They are highly respected scientists in this field, all three of them,” Perlmann said. “They have their really distinct specialties as I explained with the discoveries that are enormously respected for what they have been doing and what they continue to do in this area.” He emphasized that part of the significance of the three scientists’ works was the ability to create vaccines and therapeutics that directly addressed hepatitis C.
“It’s hard to find something that’s such a benefit to mankind as what we’re awarding this year,” he added. “It’s the discovery of a virus that has led to improvements for millions of people around the world.”
