Insidious 'affectionate killer': for which they gave the Nobel Prize in medicine

Americans Harvey Alter and Charles Rice shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with British virologist Michael Houghton. For which discovery they received the award, the publication said. with the BBC.

Photo: Shutterstock

The Nobel Committee said in a statement that the prize was awarded for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus - although, strictly speaking, only one of the three laureates identified the virus.

Alter, Rice, and Houghton hardly ever worked together. Only one of the seven scientific articles that formed the basis of the fateful discovery was co-written by two future laureates. Moreover, the name of one of them is not even mentioned in ARTICLES.

Moreover, the lead author of the article, an American scientist of Taiwanese origin, George Kuo, was not among those awarded, although he is considered by many in the scientific world to be the discoverer of the virus.

However, the Nobel committee decided otherwise.

Nothing in common

The word “hepatitis” itself is almost as insidious as the set of diseases hiding behind it. For a person without special education, it can easily create the illusion that different types of hepatitis are varieties of the same disease.

In fact, this is a common name for about one and a half dozen inflammatory liver diseases of completely different origins.

Liver dysfunction can have a variety of causes, from increased radiation and alcohol abuse to bacterial infections and an aggressive immune response.

Most often, hepatitis is of viral origin, and in order to defeat the disease, you must first determine the causative agent of the infection.

In other words, understand what kind of virus it is: what family it belongs to, how it is transmitted, and so on.

Today, almost ten viruses are known to cause liver damage. Hepatitis C, a close relative of yellow fever, is the most dangerous of them all. That is why he is often called the “gentle killer.”

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An infection can develop in the body for years without showing itself at all: the few symptoms caused by the virus can easily be mistaken for manifestations of other diseases. This makes diagnosis very difficult until the disease develops into liver cancer or cirrhosis.

"Neither A nor B"

Back in the 40s of the last century, scientists found that abnormalities in the liver are caused by at least two types of viruses.

One of them, hepatitis A, is spread through food or water and usually does not cause long-term health problems for patients. The illness it causes is sometimes called Botkin's disease, and colloquially - jaundice.

The other, hepatitis B, is transmitted through blood or other body fluids. It poses a much greater threat, since the disease often develops into a chronic form, gradually worsening the patient’s condition.

For the discovery of this virus, the American Baruch Blumberg received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1967. However, the “gentle killer” managed to hide from his pursuers for quite some time.

The first to follow the trail was Harvey Alter, who discovered that hepatitis is often transmitted through blood transfusions - despite the fact that tests of donors showed the absence of viruses known at that time in both of them.

Alter transfused the same blood into chimpanzees, and the monkeys also developed hepatitis.

The scientist came to the conclusion that the disease is caused by some unknown, third pathogen - most likely also of a viral nature. The strange hepatitis was called “neither A nor B.”

In the dark, feel

Scientists are actively looking for the causative agent of a mysterious disease, but all their efforts were in vain. Only more than 10 years later, Michael Houghton managed to assemble a collection of DNA fragments from the nucleic acids found in the blood of infected chimpanzees.

Most of them, of course, came from the genome of the monkeys themselves. However, scientists have identified several suspicious fragments that could belong to an unknown virus.

Biologists began to think further. After all, the body of people infected with hepatitis is almost certainly trying to fight the mysterious infection - which means that patients must have antibodies to it.

Research continued, although the painstaking work of scientists was a bit like looking for a black cat in a dark room. Hundreds and thousands of proteins from analyzes of infected patients had to be compared with each of the cloned DNA fragments isolated from the blood of infected monkeys.

Thus, an immunoglobulin was discovered in the blood of the infected, which in shape matched one of the proteins of a hitherto unknown virus - a relative of yellow fever.

Viral frankenstein

Now it remained to prove that this was the same virus we were looking for - not detected by tests, but at the same time transmitted through blood transfusions and causing liver disease in humans.

Charles Rice, a researcher at the University of Washington, coped with this task. He split the genome of the virus into sections, some of which seemed to him to interfere with the replication process.

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Then Rice created in the laboratory a kind of “viral Frankenstein” - a greatly simplified version of the same RNA chain, including only fragments that, in his opinion, should have reproduced in the body of primates.

Scientists introduced a new virus into the liver of a chimpanzee - and soon, as he expected, the virus was found in her blood, and the animal itself developed symptoms of chronic hepatitis.

The nature of the mysterious disease was finally proven, and soon corresponding antiviral drugs were developed.

Over the past 20 years, the hepatitis C virus has ceased to pose a deadly threat. Today it is possible to cure up to 95% of infections.

As stated in the Nobel Committee, the day is not far off when the threat of hepatitis C will be completely eliminated.

And mankind owes this to the work of Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice.

Last year, the Physiology or Medicine Prize went to the Americans William Kelin and Grenn Semenza and the Briton Peter Ratcliffe for their work on how living human cells react to a drop in oxygen content in the body.

On Tuesday, October 6, the Nobel Committee in Stockholm will announce the winners in physics, on Wednesday, October 7, in chemistry, on Thursday, October 8, in literature, and next Monday, October 12, in economics. The Peace Prize winner will be announced on Friday, October 16.

The laureate of the Peace Prize will be traditionally announced in Oslo (the rest of the prizes are awarded in Stockholm)

As ForumDaily wrote earlier:

• US President nominated for Nobel Peace Prize Donald Trump, President of Russia Vladimir Putin and the Russian oppositionist Alexey Navalny.

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