Scientists who helped identify Hepatitis C virus win 2020 Nobel Medicine Prize

Two Americans and a Briton won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday (October 5) for work in identifying the Hepatitis C virus, which causes cirrhosis and liver cancer.

    The discoveries by American scientists Harvey Alter, Charles Rice and British scientist Michael Houghton meant there was now a chance of eradicating the Hepatitis C virus completely, the Nobel assembly at Karolinska Institutet said in a statement upon awarding the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).

    The World Health Organization estimates 71 million people are infected with hepatitis C globally, which caused approximately 399,000 deaths in 2016.

    While the Nobel awards will go ahead as planned this year, they have been overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic.

    The Nobel Foundation has cancelled the traditional banquet, which forms the center-piece of the celebrations in December, and will hand out the medals and diplomas in a televised event rather than live in Stockholm.

    This year's winners will be invited to celebrate alongside the 2021 laureates, assuming the pandemic has eased by then.

    Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year. The prizes for achievements in science, peace and literature have been awarded since 1901 and were created in the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.