This year's commentators were: prof. Jadwiga Turło (Head of the Department of Drug Technology and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology MUW), prof. Dominika Nowis (acting head of the Laboratory of Experimental Medicine of MUW), Leszek Czupryniak, MD, PhD (Head of the Department of Diabetology and Internal Medicine CCH UCC MUW) and Anna Wójcicka (Warsaw Genomics, spin out UW). The meeting was hosted by Jacek Sztolcman – the director of the Center for Dialogue and Cooperation of the University of Warsaw, who, after welcoming the guests and all those gathered stressed the special importance of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded in times of the pandemic.
In 2020 the Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine were: two Americans Harvey J.Alter (National Institutes of Health) and Charles M. Rice (Rockefeller University) as well as the British citizen Michael Houghton (University of Alberta) "for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus." In its explanatory memorandum, the Nobel Committee stated that the findings of these scientists have "made a decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer in people around the world.”
The experts of the Medical University of Warsaw invited to the meeting discussed the importance of the discoveries of the three awarded scientists and the impact of their research on the progress in the detection and treatment of hepatitis C.
Prof. Dominika Nowis noted that identification by the Nobel Prize winners of the virus causing hepatitis C, as well as describing how it causes liver lesions, had a direct impact on the development of the practical medicine. She emphasized that thanks to the discovery of the structure of the virus and the way it causes the disease in humans, it become possible to develop effective drugs. She admitted that HCV is very dangerous, many times more infectious than HIV, and the disease it causes affects tens of millions of people around the world. In Poland it is about 200 thousand people.
Prof. Jadwiga Turło has introduced the currently used therapies to combat HCV. She pointed out that thanks to the research of this year's Nobel Prize winners, which resulted in development of new drugs, hepatitis C, that five years ago was a chronic disease with very little prospect of treatment, turned into a completely treatable disease.
Leszek Czupryniak, MD, PhD, noticed that the virus causing hepatitis C belongs to the same family of RNA viruses as the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and the awarding of this year's Nobel Prize fits into the current world situation in the context of growing interest in virology. He emphasized that the Nobel Prize winners' research made it possible to detect the virus in patients, helped to invent the drugs to fight HCV and, as a result, allowed to treat patients effectively. He added that this year's decision of the Nobel Committee proves that the development of an effective vaccine and a drug must be preceded by the discovery of the virus itself and the examination of its structure.
Anna Wójcicka, MD, PhD, representing the University of Warsaw, explained the possible routes of the virus infection and noted that the discovery of HCV made it possible to diagnose it, which affected the safety of blood transfusions. She pointed out that after Harvey J. Alter's discovery of the hepatitis C virus molecule, it became possible for Michael Houghton to detect antibodies in the body of infected people. The whole research on this virus was crowned by Charles M. Rice's discovery of the HCV genetic sequence. All these achievements have allowed to develop methods for treatment of hepatitis C, a disease that approx. 170 million people are infected with.
