Nobel laureate Houghton joins HKBU to develop world's first Hep C vax

Nobel laureate Professor Michael Houghton has officially joined Hong Kong Baptist University.

This as the scholar aims to turbocharge the development of the world's first hepatitis C vaccine, targeting virus strains in Asia and China.

British virologist Professor Michael Houghton discovered the hepatitis C virus nearly 30 years ago.

He and his team's discovery also paved the way for life-saving diagnostics for blood screening during the early 1990s -- virtually eradicating the risk of HPC infection through blood transfusion. He was awared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine six years ago.

So what makes Hong Kong -- and BU the right place for launching their vaccine programmes?

Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2020 MICHAEL HOUGHTON: "With the leadership here, and the vision, and the science, it's a perfect habitat to come and eliminate hepatitis C and we will do it first for the strains in China and then eventually we will expand to the global vaccine."

While the team studied multiple genomic strains prevalent from the West, his team sets sights on tapping technologies similar to mRNA-related COVID inoculation to develop the vaccine "cocktail", targeting Chinese and Asian HPC variants -- likely at a cost of a few hundred US dollars per person for immunisation.

MICHAEL HOUGHTON: "We have been in discussions with a company in Shanghai, also a company in Shenzhen. So these are expert manufacturers of RNA vaccines because the strains are so variable in China, we have to figure out what is the mixture or the cocktail of RNAs that we need to protect everyone in China."

His team hopes the new vaccine can enter clinical trials by 2028 and prove its efficacy to human beings in 2030.