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Announcement of the Nobel Prize winners Alter, Houghton and Rice at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm
Photo: Claudio Bresciani / dpa
In a year in which a virus concerns the whole world, three researchers who discovered a virus will receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine - however, Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice did not research the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus, but hepatitis -C virus.
This virus can cause chronic inflammation of the liver, also called hepatitis, and liver cancer.
According to the World Health Organization, around 71 million people worldwide have chronic hepatitis infection.
In 2016, nearly 400,000 people died from diseases caused by this infection - mainly cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Hepatitis C is a common reason for liver transplants.
The pathogen is transmitted via the blood, among other things via blood reserves in a transfusion or through shared syringes when using drugs.
Today, new antiviral drugs can cure most sufferers, but the expensive drugs are not available everywhere in the world.
Age, Houghton and Rice made the development of these active ingredients possible with their research.
The hepatitis B virus, which is responsible for some chronic inflammation of the liver after blood transfusions, was discovered back in the 1960s - Baruch Blumberg received half of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Medicine for this.
But this virus alone could not explain all hepatitis cases after blood transfusions.
Harvey Alter looked for the trigger at the US National Institutes of Health in the 1970s.
He found out that a virus, unknown at the time, was behind it.
Among other things, he succeeded in doing this by infecting chimpanzees - who can get sick just like humans - with blood from hepatitis patients.
However, it took a few more years to precisely characterize this pathogen.
Michael Houghton, who worked at the biotech company Chiron, finally succeeded in isolating the genome of the pathogen in the 1980s.
Finally, Charles Rice was able to prove at Washington University in St. Louis that this virus alone can trigger liver inflammation, i.e. that the hepatitis C virus is actually the cause of this disease and not some other blood component that may have escaped research was.
Initially, these discoveries made it possible to develop tests that could detect the virus in the blood.
In this way, infection through blood transfusions could be avoided.
Drugs followed that directly fight the infection.
The work of Alter, Houghton and Rice "saved millions of lives," said the Nobel Prize Committee.
The hepatitis C virus is a so-called RNA virus.
The pathogen has a very high mutation rate - certainly one of the reasons why a vaccination against this virus has not yet been developed.
"Unique for virology"
The virologist Sandra Ciesek from the Frankfurt University Hospital, who is mainly researching hepatitis viruses, but currently also Sars-CoV-2, describes the history of the hepatitis C virus and its therapy as "unique for virology".
With the discovery of the virus and the establishment of a cell culture model, substances that act against the pathogen could be tested in cell culture.
This has led to "that today we have several so-called
direct acting antivirals
," explains Ciesek in an email to SPIEGEL.
These drugs, which directly attack the virus or its reproduction, could be given in combination as a tablet and thus cure more than 98 percent of the patients treated.
"For example, chronic hepatitis C infection has developed from a viral disease with severe consequences - cirrhosis, liver cell cancer, death - to an easily treatable disease, and that in a relatively short period of time," writes Ciesek.
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