Charles M. Rice

Charles M. Rice (born August 25, 1952, Sacramento, California) is an American virologist who was known for his contributions to the development of highly effective treatments for chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. His work to generate a version of HCV that could be grown and studied in the laboratory enabled the development of new antiviral drugs capable of reducing HCV to undetectable levels in infected persons, essentially curing chronic infection. For this breakthrough, Rice was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with American virologist Harvey J. Alter and British-born scientist Michael Houghton.

Pursuing an early interest in veterinary medicine, Rice attended the University of California, Davis, where he graduated in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in zoology. However, after studying for a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Rice changed his focus to biology and basic research. At the California Institute of Technology, he studied biochemistry in the laboratory of American virologist James Strauss. Rice focused his graduate research on RNA viruses, particularly Sindbis virus, which is carried by mosquitoes and causes fever and joint pain in humans. Rice’s work to elucidate the genetic sequence of structural proteins of Sindbis virus laid the foundation for his work with other infectious viruses. After earning a doctoral degree in 1981, Rice remained at Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow. His deduction of the genome of the virus that causes yellow fever led to the establishment of the flavivirus family, which later included viruses that cause West Nile fever and dengue. The research also facilitated the development of a yellow fever vaccine.

In 1986 Rice joined the faculty at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. In the late 1980s he shifted his focus to the development of a vaccine for hepatitis C, and in 1989, after Alter and Houghton reported the identification of a DNA clone of the HCV RNA genome, Rice became interested in studying HCV in the laboratory. The virus, however, eluded laboratory culture. Rice later discovered that a portion of the HCV genome necessary for viral replication was missing in the laboratory HCV clone reported in 1989, and he subsequently generated a culturable version of the virus. In 1996 he provided a description of the complete HCV genome and the following year demonstrated the infectious nature of the cultured virus.

In 2001 Rice moved to Rockefeller University, where he continued his studies of HCV and made several other key findings, among them the discovery of multiple proteins required for HCV entry into liver cells. In addition, his laboratory designed assays to test for drugs capable of blocking HCV replication, which led to the discovery of new therapeutic agents for hepatitis C. The first of these drugs was approved in 2013 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in human patients.

Rice was a recipient of the Robert Koch Prize (2015) and the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (2016; shared with scientists Ralf F.W. Bartenschlager and Michael J. Sofia). He was an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004) and the National Academy of Sciences (2005).