Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to Hepatitis C discovery

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2020 was awarded jointly to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice "for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus."

The Nobel Committee announced the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine at a ceremony in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, on Monday afternoon (Bangladesh Time), reports nobelprize.org.

BBC adds: The Nobel Prize committee said their discoveries ultimately "saved millions of lives".

The virus is a common cause of liver cancer and a major reason why people need a liver transplant.

In the 1960s, there was huge concern that people receiving donated blood were getting chronic hepatitis (liver inflammation) from an unknown, mysterious disease.

The Nobel Prize committee said a blood transfusion at the time was like "Russian roulette".

Highly sensitive blood tests mean such cases have now been eliminated in many parts of the world, and effective anti-viral drugs have also been developed.

"For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating Hepatitis C virus from the world," the prize committee said.

However, the virus still infects 70 million people at year and kills around 400,000.