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Lasker Award winner Michael Sofia created a pill to fight an incurable virus. Now he is setting his sights on another
Just three years ago patients suffering from hepatitis C faced some bleak treatment options. The main drug employed against this viral disease was only available via injection. It also came with serious side effects and—for too many patients—was not even effective. Then a transformative new pill called sofosbuvir hit the market.
Better known as Sovaldi, the drug managed to recast hepatitis C from a hard-to-treat illness into an easily managed one that can be cured in just a few months. When used alongside other drugs it also worked much faster than any other hepatitis C treatments and had both fewer side effects and much higher success rates. About 90 percent of patients with a common form of the virus are cured with the medicine. The catch, of course, has been the price tag: more than $80,000 for a course of treatment.
Even before it went on sale the treatment became a flashpoint that pitted patients against pharmaceutical companies over the cost of medical innovation, and the debate cast a pall over the drug’s release. But the medical feat—creating this unprecedented weapon against hepatitis C—has scooped up accolades including the announcement Tuesday that its creator, Michael Sofia, has netted a prestigious Lasker Award for revolutionizing hepatitis C care. Lasker Awards, which recognize scientists’ major contributions to medical science or those who have performed public service on behalf of the field, are often considered a pit stop on the way to a Nobel Prize.
Sofia, who devised the drug while working at the pharmaceutical company Pharmasset, shares this award with two other scientists who did fundamental work on the disease: Ralf Bartenschlager at Heidelberg University and Charles Rice at The Rockefeller University. The two scientists managed to coax viral cells that cause hepatitis C to multiply inside lab-grown host cells, enabling crucial testing required to invent candidate drugs. Other 2016 Lasker awards will go to a scientist who unraveled the mechanism by which cells copy DNA and to a trio of researchers who identified how humans and most animals sense and adapt to changes in oxygen availability.