Michael Houghton (virologist)

Michael Houghton (born 1949) is a British scientist and Nobel Prize laureate. Along with Qui-Lim Choo, George Kuo and Daniel W. Bradley, he co-discovered Hepatitis C in 1989. He also co-discovered the Hepatitis D genome in 1986. The discovery of the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) led to the rapid development of diagnostic reagents to detect HCV in blood supplies, which has reduced the risk of acquiring HCV through blood transfusion from one in three to about one in two million. It is estimated that antibody testing has prevented at least 40,000 new infections per year in the US alone and many more worldwide.
Houghton is currently Canada Excellence Research Chair in Virology and Li Ka Shing Professor of Virology at the University of Alberta, where he is also Director of the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute. He is the co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice.
Early life and education.
Born in the United Kingdom in 1949, his father was a truck driver and union official. He was educated at Alleyn's School and at the age of 17 was inspired to become a microbiologist after reading about Louis Pasteur. Houghton won a scholarship to study at the University of East Anglia graduating with a lower second class honours degree in biological sciences in 1972, and subsequently completed his PhD in biochemistry at King's College London in 1977.
Career.
Houghton joined G. D. Searle & Company before moving to Chiron Corporation in 1982. It was at Chiron that Houghton together with colleagues Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo, and Daniel W. Bradley from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, first discovered evidence for HCV. This research, however, has been challenged on the basis of failure to demonstrate pathogenicity – in other words, that the virus identified by Houghton actually causes hepatitis. Houghton's research depended on the work of his later Nobel co-recipient Harvey Alter dating from 1978. Alter's NIH team had drawn blood from what was known as "Non-A Non-B Hepatitis" and injected it in five Chimpanzees. After 14 weeks, the chimpanzees showed elevated liver values on standard tests - possible evidence for a virus (notably Alter's experiment lacked a control group, meaning a liver reaction to foreign blood serum could not be ruled out)
After a well-funded publicity campaign by Chiron to gain support from the NIH's establishment, an FDA 1992 Blood Supply order reaped millions for the corporation. Chiron's CEO boasted, "We have a blockbuster product." The evidence for HCV alleged by Chiron and Houghton at the time of the many blood screening orders for this blockbuster product was circumstantial, as the virus had not been isolated by traditional means and would remain an enigma for many years. By the 8th International HCV Congress in Paris in 2001, Houghton exclaimed in exasperation, "Where is the Hepatitis C Virus? Has anybody seen it?" Nobel co-recipient Charles Rice published papers claiming an answer to this question.
Houghton was co-author of a series of seminal studies published in 1989 and 1990 that identified hepatitis C antibodies in blood, particularly among patients at higher risk of contracting the disease, including those who had received blood transfusions. This work led to the development of a blood screening test in 1990; widespread blood screening that began in 1992 with the development of a more sensitive test has since virtually eliminated hepatitis C contamination of donated blood supplies in Canada. In other studies published during the same period, Houghton and collaborators linked hepatitis C with liver cancer.
In 2013, Houghton's team at the University of Alberta showed that a vaccine derived from a single strain of Hepatitis C was effective against all strains of the virus. the vaccine is in pre-clinical trials.