Doctors who Discovered the Hepatitis C Virus Win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Hepatitis C virus (Wikimedia).

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden awarded Dr. Harvey Alter, Dr. Michael Houghton, and Dr. Charles Rice the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on October 5 for their discovery of the Hepatitis C virus. 

The Hepatitis C virus causes an infection in the liver that is spread through contact with blood that is contaminated with the virus. Some people show no symptoms, and others show symptoms of liver disease. In some cases, it can lead to the development of liver cancer or cirrhosis. The virus also used to be transmitted through blood transfusions before widespread blood screening. 

Alted had been studying hepatitis in blood transfusion patients and found that there were many cases that could not be explained by the Hepatitis A or B viruses. 

Houghton’s contribution to the discovery was isolating the virus’ genes. His team did this using the blood of an infected chimpanzee. Houghton says, “You know, at the time of trying to discover Hep C in the ‘80s, it was a difficult task. We didn’t have the tools available then that we do now of course, so it was a lot of effort actually, a lot of brute force, and just trying to use and apply all the methods available then. And we must have tried 30 different approaches at least over 7 or 8 years, and eventually we got one clone, after screening probably hundreds of millions of clones.” The clone that they found was a fragment of DNA that encoded the virus’ proteins. The virus was then named Hepatitis C. 

Rice focused his work on a particular section of the virus’ DNA that he thought could be important for replication. By injecting the RNA of the virus into chimpanzees, he was able to prove that the Hepatitis C virus was what was causing the symptoms in the blood transfusion patients. 

The discovery of the virus was a group effort by all three men and their teams over the course of many years. “Yeah, you know, it’s a good story for kind of non-directed research, where we have a hypothesis, but you have no idea where it’s going to go, just looking to see what caused post-transfusion Hepatitis, and initiated, you know, a very, very, very long study, that involved many people,” says Alter. “It’s really a 50-year story.”