New York: This year’s Nobel Prize is awarded to three scientists who have made 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.
Two Americans and a British scientist have been awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for their joint discovery of the hepatitis C virus.
Harvey J Alter at the US National Institutes of Health in Maryland, Charles M Rice at Rockefeller University in New York and Michael Houghton, a British virologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, share the 10m Swedish kronor prize (£870,000), announced by the Nobel assembly from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
The physics prize will be announced on Tuesday and the prize for chemistry on Wednesday, both from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice made seminal discoveries that led to the identification of a novel virus, Hepatitis C virus. Prior to their work, the discovery of the Hepatitis A and B viruses had been critical steps forward, but the majority of blood-borne hepatitis cases remained unexplained. The discovery of Hepatitis C virus revealed the cause of the remaining cases of chronic hepatitis and made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives.
