The Nobel Assembly of high school Karolinska in Sweden has decided to award this year's award Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology to the American researchers Harvey J Alter and Charles M Rice, and the British Michael Houghton for the finding of the hepatitis C virus. Unlike many other editions of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, the relevance of this finding requires little explanation for non-experts, as this inflammatory liver disease is well known in our environment. Suffice it to say that from agreement to the World Health Organization (WHO) hepatitis C affects around 140 million people worldwide, approximately one million in Spain. The hepatitis C virus is easily transmitted by contact with the blood of the infected patient. According to the WHO, the main routes of infection include the use of infected syringes and needles, venereal transmission (especially in men who have sex with men), and transfusion of untested blood or blood products. It is estimated that about half a million people die each year as a result of the complications of chronic hepatitis C virus infection: cirrhosis and liver cancer.

There are few examples in the history of medicine in which the cause of a disease and its treatment are discovered in the course of a scientist's professional life. Hepatitis C is one of them, and the research of Alter, Rice and Houghton was decisive. In the early 1970s, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA, Harvey Alter was looking for an explanation for cases of hepatitis occurring in patients who had received a blood transfusion in which the presence of the well-known hepatitis A and B viruses had been ruled out. Working with chimpanzees, Alter and his team discovered that the blood of these patients could transmit the disease to the primates, and that the infectious agent was viral in nature, so they named the disease "non-A, non-B hepatitis". The next step core topic in this adventure was taken in the 1980s by Michael Houghton from the laboratories of the business pharmaceutical company Chiron Corporation. Houghton and his collaborators used the incipient tools of molecular biology to isolate from the blood of an infected chimpanzee the genome of the virus, composed of ribonucleic acid or RNA, which they named the hepatitis C virus. The presence of antibodies to the virus in the serum of infected patients observed by Houghton strongly suggested that the virus was the causative agent of hepatitis C. However, in science, assumptions are not enough. The final evidence that the hepatitis C virus caused the disease came shortly thereafter from Charles M. Rice, a molecular virologist at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Rice modified the RNA that constitutes the genome of the virus, obtaining variants of this RNA that, when directly injected into the liver of primates, resulted in the appearance of virus in the sange, and in the development of a chronic hepatitis similar to that observed in patients.

We can say without a doubt that the findings of the researchers awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology this year have radically changed the outlook for a terrible disease. On the one hand, their discoveries led to the development of highly sensitive diagnostic tests, which have made it possible to eliminate most transfusion-associated infections. More recently, and thanks also to the knowledge generated by the award winners on the biology of the virus, the pharmaceutical industry has been able to design effective drugs that allow the cure of hepatitis C. These antivirals, such as sofosbuvir, are already available in many countries, regardless of their level of development and purchasing power, so that a decisive step has been taken towards the complete eradication of hepatitis C. Finally, and by way of reflection, the history of finding of the hepatitis C virus also illustrates other aspects that in our current society tend to be stigmatized or undervalued. On the one hand, these discoveries would not have been possible without the use of experimental animals, thanks to which people can now be cured. On the other hand, the application of molecular biology techniques, a product of the so-called "basicresearch ", which is difficult to finance, was absolutely essential for these discoveries. Finally, it should be emphasized that this great success story was achieved thanks to the cooperation between scientists from academia and private industry. If this common effort continues, we will undoubtedly be able to win the battle against the disease faster.