Milestones in the discovery of hepatitis C

Abstract

The discovery of hepatitis C has been a landmark in public health as it brought the opportunity to save millions of lives through the diagnosis, prevention and cure of the disease. The combined work of three researchers, Alter H, Houghton M and Rice C, which set the basis for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of hepatitis C apart from laying the ground work for a new approach to study infections in general and developing new antiviral agents. This is a story of a transfusion-associated infection. A series of clinical studies demonstrated the existence of an infectious agent associated with hepatitis. That was followed by the identification of what was later known to be the hepatitis C virus (HCV) and the development of diagnostic tests. It all preceded the full molecular identification and demonstration of a causal effect. Finally it ended up with the development and discovery of a new class of therapeutic drugs, the direct acting antivirals, which are now used not only to cure the disease but most probably, to eliminate the problem. This work started with Dr Alter H who demonstrated that a new virus was responsible for the majority of post-transfusion hepatitis followed by Houghton M who cloned the virus and developed the blood test to identify those cases that carried the virus. Finally, the work of Rice C demonstrated that a cloned HCV produced after applying molecular biology techniques could cause long-standing infection and cause the same disease as the one observed in humans.