Michael Houghton

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Michael Houghton

Michael A. Houghton (* 1949 in England ) is a British biochemist and virologist, known for his involvement in the development of a hepatitis C test.

Houghton was a working class man, his father a union official and truck driver. He was a good student and was admitted to private school at 15 after taking the O-level exam, taking the A-level exams at Oxford and Cambridge, but then opting for the University of East Anglia because of the good biology program. Houghton studied biology at the University of East Anglia (Bachelor 1972) and received his PhD in 1977 from King's College London . He then worked at Searle Research Laboratories in Buckinghamshire before becoming head of the non-A-non-B hepatitis division at Chiron Corporation in 1982 . From 2010 he was at the University of Albertaon a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Virology and as Li Ka Shing Professor of Virology. He is the director of the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute there.

After Daniel W. Bradley of the CDC isolated the hepatitis C virus (then still called Non A, Non B) (from chimpanzee serum) in the early 1980s, Houghton (in collaboration with Bradley) was able to clone it in parts at Chiron and develop a test that was used in the early 1990s and made it possible to test blood products against the pathogens that cause liver cirrhosis and liver cancer.

His team at Chiron included Qui-Lim Choo (Senior Scientist at Chiron) and George Kuo (Head of Immune Chemistry at Chiron).

In 1993 he received the Robert Koch Prize with Bradley and Hans-Georg Rsameee . In 1992 he received the Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award from the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB) with Choo, Kuo and others . He also received the 1994 William Beaumont Prize from the American Gastroenterological Association. For 2013 he was awarded a Canada Gairdner International Award , which he declined because his colleagues Choo and Kuo were not also honored.

For the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, Houghton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2020 together with Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice .

Web links

Commons : Michael Houghton  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b L. B. Seef, MG Ghany, Dr. Michael Houghton, in: Gilbert R. Thompson (Ed.), Pioneers of Medicine without a Nobel Prize, Imperial College Press 2014, p. 200 ff, google books
  2. ↑ Biography in Boyer et al. (Ed.): Liver Cirrhosis and Its Development, Kluwer 2001.
  3. ↑ Choo QL, Kuo G, Weiner AJ, Overby LR, Bradley DW, Houghton M. Isolation of a CDNA Clone Derived from a Blood-borne Non-A, Non-B Viral Hepatitis Genome, Science, Volume 244, 1989, pp. 359-362.
  4. ^ Canadian declines prestigious Gairdner award for medical research. CBC / Radio-Canada (cbc.ca); Retrieved March 20, 2013
  5. ^ The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2020 . In: nobelprize.org, October 5, 2020).
personal data
SURNAME Houghton, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Houghton, Michael A.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British biochemist and virologist
DATE OF BIRTH 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH England