DE LA HEPATITIS NO-A, NO-B HACIA LA ELIMINACIÓN DEL VIRUS DE LA HEPATITIS C

Abstract

In october 5 2020, the Nobel Assembly and the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, announced that three scientists Drs. Harvey Later, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice were the awarded with the Nobel prize in Medicine 2020 “for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus”. Hepatitis C virus (HCV) in one of several viruses capable of causing chronic liver inflammation and life-threatening pathologies like cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Dr. Harvey Alter observations at the NIH Clinical Center prompted the postulate of a virus that was different from the hepatitis A and hepatitis B viruses known at that time. After many years of frustration trying to identify the infectious agent responsible for the non-A, non-B, transfusion-associated virus using conventional virological techniques, Dr. Michael Houghton succeeded not only at unequivocally identifying HCV, but also at generating essential reagents to prevent the spread of the virus through contaminated blood banks. These tools and subsequent molecular tools develop after this discovery suggest that more than 70 million people are currently infected with HCV worldwide. These studies were followed again by many years of frustrated attempts at isolating and propagating the virus in cell culture models to study basic virology on HCV. Dr. Charles Rice pioneered many studies aiming at characterizing basic functions of the viral proteins for which he developed among others, reverse genetics systems and functional assays in the form of replicons, a biological tool that was instrumental to develop the current antiviral therapies. However, its pioneer reverse genetics experiments in the chimpanzee model, by which he rescued infectious virions from cloned viral genetic material, granted his presence among the awardees. In this brief review, we discuss the context in which these seminal contributions were made and how HCV research has been propelled to the point where WHO is suggesting virus eradication using the currently available therapies.