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...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.展开更多
文摘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.
