The jury announcing the winners said that the Americans Harvey Alter and Charles Rice together with Briton Michael Houghton were honoured with the prestigious award for "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."
As report by AFP, the jury further said that the discovery 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.
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Know About The Winners Of Nobel Prize For Medicine 2020:
Charles M. Rice: Charles M. Rice awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology, was born in 1952 in Sacramento, USA. He is a Professor at The Rockefeller University in New York. he studies pathogenic viruses and innate antiviral immune mechanisms. As described in his bio at the University's official website, Rice is the Head of the Laboratory of Virology and Infectious Disease. Rice’s research directly contributed to a cure for hepatitis C, an aggressive disease that affects 170 million people worldwide.
Michael Houghton: Born in the United Kingdom, Michael Houghton is a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Virology and the Li Ka Shing Professor of Virology at The University of Alberta. As stated in his bio, his USA laboratory and collaborators in 1989 identified the hepatitis C virus (HCV) and then developed blood tests that have since prevented millions of infections from tainted blood donations around the world. He has received numerous international prizes for this work including the 2000 Clinical Lasker Award, the Robert Koch Medal in 1993 and the Canadian CLF-CASL gold medal in 2012.
Harvey J. Alter: Harvey J. Alter was born in 1935 in New York, USA. He is a senior investigator at the Clinical Center’s Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. A written in his bio, Alter in 2000 was awarded the prestigious Clinical Lasker Award. In 2002, he became the first Clinical Center scientist elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and in that same year he was elected to the Institute of Medicine.