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Michael Houghton: Making a difference

With a passion for medical research sparked at the age of 17, Michael Houghton has been able to prevent millions of people from suffering from hepatitis C, and he expects a vaccine in the near future, hopefully within the next decade.
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has heightened awareness about the prevalence and ferocity of viruses and the need for better detection and treatment to prevent widespread infections.
For decades, thousands of people have been contracting and dying of hepatitis C, a strain of the hepatitis virus transmitted by infected blood, usually through shared needles. People can unknowingly be infected with hepatitis C for decades, before cirrhosis of the liver or cancer are discovered, revealing its presence. Hepatitis C has killed about 400,000 people a year for the past 50 years. Today the spread of hepatitis C is much more under control, thanks to work by researchers who earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr. Michael Houghton, Ph.D., University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, identified the hepatitis C virus in 1989, along with colleagues Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo. Houghton shared the prize with Dr. Harvey Alter, M.D., U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Dr. Charles M. Rice, Ph.D., Rockefeller University in New York City.
Making a difference
News of winning the Nobel Prize for his years of work left Michael Houghton feeling, “Very pleased, honored and happy, but a little sad that some close colleagues were not co-recipients,” Houghton notes. He adds that he was fortunate to work in conjunction with both Alter and Rice, whom he called excellent scientists and clinicians.
“Alter is great, he did a lot of work in the 1970s that showed hepatitis C was blood borne, but not strain A or B,” says Houghton. “And Rice is one of the world’s greatest virologists, he brought a lot of talent to the field.”
Reading about the life and work of Louis Pasteur when he was 17 sparked Houghton’s interest in medical research, which has become his passion.
“It’s hard work and takes a long time, but when you get it to work, it’s just so satisfying to make a difference,” he says. “What drives me is knowing what spreads it [a virus.]”

”We had a decent chance to solve the problem”
Michael Houghton came to the University of Alberta in 2010 as the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Virology in the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology. In recent months he has been working remotely from his home in California.
Trained as a molecular biologist in the United Kingdom, he and his wife moved to the U.S. in 1982, when recombinant DNA technology started to emerge in the 1980s and most of the labs were in America. Houghton took a job at Chiron Corporation, where he met Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo, as well as Daniel W. Bradley from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and they first discovered evidence for another strain of hepatitis. Houghton had planned to work on interferon genes, but he was introduced to the problem of nonA, nonB hepatitis, and realized some of his existing work would apply.
“They dedicated a lab to it, and we thought we had decent chance to solve the problem, even though it was difficult.”
Besides his research on the hepatitis C virus, Houghton has also contributed to the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, and has worked on vaccines for a type of streptococcus infection, Alzheimer’s disease and several forms of cancer.
A vaccine is critical
The discovery of the virus led to the creation of antiviral therapies that cure 95 percent of those infected, making hepatitis C the first chronic viral illness that can be cured. Tests also were developed to screen blood donations, and by 1992, the virus was virtually eliminated from blood supplies. Four years later, this screening led to a reduction in new hepatitis C infections by more than 80 percent. By 2012, Houghton and his University of Alberta colleagues developed a hepatitis C vaccine that is now in late pre-clinical stage testing.
“You can’t just control it with antivirals. I think with the research my lab and others have done, I think a vaccine is feasible. I would expect one in the next decade, hopefully sooner.”
When a virus like hepatitis C infects between two and three million people a year worldwide, a vaccine is critical, according to Houghton. “You can’t just control it with antivirals. I think with the research my lab and others have done, I think a vaccine is feasible. I would expect one in the next decade, hopefully sooner,” he says.
“This virus is amazingly well-adapted to humans. The way it replicates and secretes into the liver from blood, it has a shield, and is wrapped up in a coat of lipids to inhibit the effect of antibodies.”
Pinning down hepatitis C took seven years, longer than Houghton anticipated.
“This virus is amazingly well-adapted to humans,” he says. “The way it replicates and secretes into the liver from blood, it has a shield, and is wrapped up in a coat of lipids to inhibit the effect of antibodies. It’s amazing to see how it evolves and adapts to humans. Hepatitis C antibodies are slower to build up. During this time, other things happen with an immune response and when antibodies appear, they are not as numerous as for hepatitis A and B and many other viruses.”
Prepare for future pandemics
Science now needs to apply some of the lessons from the hepatitis research to other diseases, especially the new coronavirus, and prepare for future pandemics, according to Houghton.
“COVID-19 has taught us some important lessons. We need to bring those lessons into play as soon as possible.”
While the swift development of the COVID-19 vaccine was a huge step toward containing the new coronavirus, the critical issue will be how long the immunity from the vaccine lasts, he cautions. “We all need to get vaccines as soon as possible, but we are going to want to see proof of durable immunity. We need to follow-up recipients in trials to see how long their immunity lasts. All signs are that we will need boosters, which could be the norm. We do that at a world level with the flu.”
“We all need to get vaccines as soon as possible, but we are going to want to see proof of durable immunity. We need to follow-up recipients in trials to see how long their immunity lasts. All signs are that we will need boosters, which could be the norm. We do that at a world level with the flu.”
Better preparation and information sharing among nations and agencies will also be critical to preventing future pandemics, Houghton adds. Scientists learned a few months into the pandemic that the vaccine created for the SARS virus that broke out in 2003 could neutralize the coronavirus.
“We could have used that to stop most of the spread of COVID-19. But when the SARS epidemic ended, companies stopped making the vaccine and didn’t store extra doses because of the cost. If they had made and stockpiled the SARS vaccine in 2003, we could have used that to stop most the spread of COVID.”
World governments need to work together to help defray the cost of stockpiling vaccines to protect against future viruses, he adds, and research needs to be ongoing. “Everyone knows now how important infectious disease research is. We should have larger budgets for this, now that we know we can really can make a vaccine in world-record time. It usually takes ten years, so we have to apply that strategy to other infections. The new RNA technology helped researchers work fast, but also everyone worked together.”
“We can’t play the blame game. Let’s get together maturely and discuss this. We have to do what we can to minimize pandemics.”
That cooperation needs to continue and expand, adds Houghton. “All the countries of the world have to discuss what they can do at a public health level to minimize the creation of another pandemic. We need to cut down exposure to livestock, for one. We need to discuss the situation calmly and maturely and the World Health Organization (WHO) needs to organize that. We can’t play the blame game. Let’s get together maturely and discuss this. We have to do what we can to minimize pandemics.”

Facts
Michael Houghton, Ph.D.
Age: 71
Born: United Kingdom
Nationality: Dual American and British citizenship.
College: University of East Anglia, King’s College, PhD in biochemistry.
Personal: Married with two children, one grandchild. When he is not working, Houghton says he enjoys cricket, golf and soccer and spending time with his family. He is looking forward to spending time with his granddaughter and visiting his son in Hawaii when the pandemic is under control.
Updated: February 4, 2025, 03:25 pm
Published: December 20, 2020
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