Michael Houghton PhD is an international leader in viral hepatitis and recent Nobel Prize Laureate for his discovery of the hepatitis C virus (HCV). In 1989, his USA laboratory & collaborators identified the HCV and then developed blood tests that have since prevented millions of infections from tainted blood donations around the world. He has received numerous international prizes for this work including the 2000 Clinical Lasker Award, the Robert Koch Medal in 1993 and the Canadian CLF-CASL gold medal in 2012. His passion is the application of biomedical research to prevent disease.

Along with Dr. Lorne Tyrrell and a large team of experts within his academic lab and the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute, Dr. Houghton is developing a vaccine against HCV by optimising both the production of cross-neutralising antibodies and cross-reactive cellular immune responses to the many different genotypes of HCV that occur around the world. Clinical trials are expected to be initiated in 2019.His laboratory has also discovered new blood biomarkers associated with autoimmune liver disease which will be tested for clinical diagnostic utility in 2018/9.He is also involved in other programs such as the discovery of new antivirals, anti-cancer agents and inhibitors of fatty liver disease, all incorporating state-of-art computational science allied with biomedical methods.

Here is a link to Dr. Houghton's Recent Publications