Jurados

Charles M. Rice (Sacramento, August 25, 1952) is an American virologist. He won, in 2020, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for his “decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis” with the “discovery of the hepatitis C virus”, together with Harvey James Alter and Michael Houghton. Rice graduated with a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of California, Davis, in 1974. In 1981, he received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, where he studied RNA viruses in the laboratory of James Strauss. He remained at Caltech for four years to do postdoctoral research. After his postdoctoral work, Rice moved with his research group to the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1986, where he remained until 2001. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Cornell University. While at Caltech, he was involved in research on the Sindbis virus genome and the establishment of flaviviruses as their own family of viruses. The strain of yellow fever virus he used for this work was eventually used for the development of the yellow fever vaccine. While exploring the Sindbis virus, Rice described how he produced infectious flavivirus RNA in the laboratory in a 1989 paper published in The New Biologist. The paper attracted the attention of Stephen Feinstone, who was studying hepatitis C virus and suggested that Rice use the technique to develop a hepatitis C vaccine. In 1997, Rice grew the first infectious clone of the hepatitis C virus for use in studies with chimpanzees, in whom the virus was also endemic. In 2005, Rice was also part of a team that demonstrated that a strain of an acute form of the virus identified in a human patient can be forced to replicate in a laboratory. Rice's contribution to hepatitis C research has earned him many awards.