What is Hepatitis C virus, the discovery of which helped three scientists win the Nobel Medicine award?

Recently, Americans Harvey J. Alter, Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton jointly won the Nobel Prize for medicine for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus

Hepatitis C

Hepatitis C is a blood-borne virus and a major cause of cirrhosis, liver inflammation and liver cancer. It can be transmitted through blood and contaminated injections

Globally around 71 million people have chronic infection with the Hepatitis C virus, according to WHO

Discovery of Hepatitis C

In 1960s, A large number of people receiving donated blood were getting sick from an unknown disease.

Later, in 1970s, Harvey Alter showed that giving blood from infected patients to chimpanzee led to them developing this mystery disease which came to be knowns as “non-A, non-B” hepatitis But despite over 10 years of effort, Alter and his collaborators were not able to establish the identity of the virus.

After painstaking work screening over a million DNA sequences, Michael Houghton was able to identify the new virus in 1982, after which it was named Hepatitis C.

In 1997, Charles Rice, then working at Washington University, was able to conclusively show that it was indeed this virus that was causing chronic hepatitis in human beings.

The discovery of Hepatitis C virus was one of the important milestones in improvement in public health that had raised hopes for eliminating the disease.

How is it treated?

Since the discovery of the virus, antiviral drugs have now become available. Tests have been developed to identify blood that has the virus. However, a vaccine for Hepatitis C has still not been developed.