Charles Rice

Rockefeller University

Charles Moen Rice is an American virologist, the Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Professor in Virology at the Rockefeller University, and head of the Laboratory of Virology and Infectious Disease, with adjunct appointments at Cornell University and the Washington University School of Medicine where he earlier directed a hepatitis research center. He shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harvey J. Alter and Michael Houghton for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. Rice's decisive contribution was to prove that the cloned HCV genome was sufficient to cause infection: by engineering a functional, infectious complementary DNA clone and later a sub-genomic replicon that could propagate the virus in cultured human liver cells, he supplied the missing experimental tool that turned HCV from an uncultivable agent into a tractable drug-discovery target. That replicon system underpinned the development of the direct-acting antivirals that now cure more than 95 percent of hepatitis C cases. He co-founded Apath, LLC to license these cell-culture and replicon reagents, and his patents are managed through Rockefeller's technology-transfer office, making his laboratory an unusually direct academic-to-industry node for vendors selling cell-culture systems, virology reagents, antiviral screening platforms and infectious-disease assays. Rice has also received the Robert Koch Prize (2015) and the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (2016).