The 2020 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for the Discovery of Hepatitis C Virus: A Triumph of Curiosity and Persistence.

Ghany, Marc G; Lok, Anna S F; Dienstag, Jules L; Feinstone, Stephen M; Hoofnagle, Jay H; Liang, T Jake; Seeff, Leonard B; Cohen, David E; Bezerra, Jorge A; Chung, Raymond T

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology was awarded to Drs. Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice for their contributions to the discovery and characterization of the hepatitis C virus (HCV), a small, enveloped, positive-sense RNA virus belonging to the genus Hepacivirus within the Flaviviridae family. Chronic HCV infection is a leading cause of cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma worldwide and an important contributor to global mortality. Dr. Harvey Alter, a hematologist at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, along with his long-term collaborator, Bob Purcell in NIAID, recognized that most cases of posttransfusion hepatitis were unrelated to hepatitis A virus (HAV) or hepatitis B virus (HBV)-hence the term non-A, non-B hepatitis (NANBH)-and showed the NANBH agent was transmissible experimentally.