- Person
- Harvey J. Alter
- Lived
- b. 1935
- Field
- Transfusion medicine, hepatology
- From
- American
The story
Harvey Alter was born in New York City in 1935 into a Jewish family and grew up in Ridgewood, Queens. After medical school at the University of Rochester he joined the blood bank of the National Institutes of Health in 1961, where as a young fellow he helped discover the Australia antigen, later shown by Baruch Blumberg to be part of the hepatitis B virus.
In the 1960s and early 1970s a blood transfusion carried a serious risk of hepatitis, a liver infection that can smoulder silently for decades before causing cirrhosis or liver cancer. Testing donated blood for hepatitis B prevented some cases, but Alter and his colleagues at the NIH Clinical Center showed that many remained, and that hepatitis A was not the cause either.
Alter's team followed people who received transfusions and kept carefully catalogued samples of blood from both donors and recipients. In papers from 1972 onward they showed that most transfusion hepatitis was caused by neither of the known viruses, and in 1978 they showed that blood from these patients could transmit the disease to chimpanzees and that the agent behaved like a virus. The illness became known as non-A, non-B hepatitis.
The virus eluded identification for more than a decade until Michael Houghton and colleagues at the company Chiron isolated its genetic material and named it hepatitis C virus, publishing in 1989. Alter's group used its stored samples to confirm that the new virus caused most non-A, non-B hepatitis, and Charles Rice later proved that the virus alone could cause the disease. Blood tests for hepatitis C followed.
In the United States the risk of hepatitis after transfusion fell from about 30 percent in 1970 to nearly zero. In 2020 Alter, Houghton and Rice shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel Assembly said the discovery made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives, and that hepatitis C can now, for the first time in history, be cured.
Why it matters
Screening donated blood for hepatitis C has made transfusions far safer, and antiviral drugs developed after the virus was found can now cure the infection.
About Harvey J. Alter
NIH doctor whose studies proved that an unknown virus, later named hepatitis C, caused hepatitis after blood transfusions, leading to blood screening that saves countless lives. Nobel Prize 2020.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2020 NobelPrize.org
- Harvey J. Alter, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Harvey J. Alter Wikipedia
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