Charles Rice, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine: ‘It’s a crime that a drug exists that could cure everyone yet not everybody has access to it’

Charles Rice, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine: ‘It’s a crime that a drug exists that could cure everyone yet not everybody has access to it’

This smiling man asking for a glass of water at a hotel bar has helped save the lives ofmillions of people, according to the Swedish committee that awarded him the Nobel Prize in Medicine. He is American virologistCharles Rice, who won the award five years ago for his role in the discovery of thehepatitis C virus, a pathogen that silently destroys the liver and can develop into a deadly cancer. The virus still infects 50 million people and kills 240,000 every year, despite the fact that the breakthroughs of Rice and other colleagues enabled chemist Michael J. Sofia to discover a cure in 2007, named after him: sofosbuvir. When it became clear that this new drug was miraculous, U.S. pharmaceutical company Gilead bought Sofia’s company, Pharmasset, for $11 billion.

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