Nordic Life Science 1
82 pandemic has heightened awareness about the pr
evalence and ferocity of viruses and the need for better detection and treatment to prevent widespread infections. For decades, thousands of people have been contracting and dying of hepatitis C, a strain of the hepatitis virus transmitted by infected blood, usually through shared needles. People can unknowingly be infected with hepatitis C for decades, before cirrhosis of the liver or cancer are discovered, revealing its presence. Hepatitis C has killed about 400,000 people a year for the past 50 years. Today the spread of hepatitis C is much more under control, thanks to work by researchers who earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr. Michael Houghton, Ph.D., University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, identified the hepatitis C virus in 1989, along with colleagues Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo. Houghton shared the prize with Dr. Harvey Alter, M.D., U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Dr. Charles M. Rice, Ph.D., Rockefeller University in New York City. News of winning the Nobel Prize for his years of work left Michael Houghton feeling, “Very pleased, honored and happy, but a little sad that some close colleagues were not co-recipients,” he notes. He adds that he was fortunate to work in conjunction with both Alter and Rice, whom he called excellent scientists and clinicians. “Alter is great, he did a lot of work in the 1970s that showed hepatitis C was blood borne, but not strain A or B,” says Houghton. “And Rice is one of the world’s greatest virologists, he brought a lot of talent to the field.” Reading about the life and work of Louis Pasteur when he was 17 sparked Houghton’s interest in medical research, which has become his passion. “It’s hard work and takes a long time, but when you get it to work, it’s just so satisfying to make a difference,” he says. “What drives me is knowing what spreads it [a virus.]” Michael Houghton came to the University of Alberta in 2010 as the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Virology in the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology. In recent months he has been working remotely from his home in California. Trained as a molecular biologist in the United Kingdom, he and his wife moved to the U.S. in 1982, when recombinant DNA technology started to emerge in the 1980s and most of the labs were in America. Houghton took a job at Chiron Corporation, where he met Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo, as well as Daniel W. Bradley from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and they first discovered evidence for another strain of hepatitis. Houghton had planned to work on interferon genes, but he was introduced to the problem of nonA, nonB hepatitis, and realized some of his existing work would apply. “They dedicated a lab to it, and we thought we had decent chance to solve the problem, even though it was difficult.” Besides his research on the hepatitis C virus, Houghton has also contributed to the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, and has worked on vaccines for a type of streptococcus infection, Alzheimer’s disease and several forms of cancer. The discovery of the virus led to the creation of antiviral therapies that cure 95 percent of those infected, making hepatitis C the first chronic viral illness that can be cured. Tests also were developed to screen blood donations, and by 1992, the virus was virtually eliminated from blood supplies. Four years later, this screening led to a reduction in new hepatitis C infections by more than 80 percent. By 2012, Houghton and his University of Alberta colleagues developed a hepatitis C vaccine that is now in late pre-clinical stage testing. When a virus like hepatitis C infects between two and three million people a year worldwide, a vaccine is critical, according to Houghton. “You can’t just control it with antivirals. I think with the research my lab and others have done, I think a vaccine is feasible. I would expect one in the next decade, hopefully sooner,” he says. Pinning down hepatitis C took seven years, longer than Houghton anticipated. The Nobel Prize medal and diploma were presented to Michael Houghton outside his home. PHOTO HAN HOUGHTON