Hepatitis C vaccine discovered

A vaccine has been discovered by Professor Michael Houghton that will potentially help combat hepatitis C. Professor Houghton, Li Ka Shing Chair in Virology at the University of Alberta, also led the team that discovered the hepatitis C virus in 1989. Currently, there are no vaccines against the disease available. The vaccine was developed from a single strain and has been shown to be effective against all known strains of the virus. It took more than 10 years to develop and following previous vaccine tests funded by the Canadian National Institutes of Health that yielded promising results. Professor Houghton noted that there remained two critical questions. “Did the recipients actually produce antibodies that could neutralize the actual infectious virus,” he asked, “and if they could, how broad was the neutralizing response?” The challenge, according to Houghton, was that hepatitis C is more virulent than HIV, thus coming up with a vaccine that would...