Charles M. Rice

Charles M. Rice: Biography in Details

Who is Charles M Rice?

Charles M Rice is an American virologist and Nobel Laureate 2020. He is famous for his discovery and isolation of the Hepatitis C virus.

During his award, he was working under the faculty of Rockefeller University. He was Scientific and Executive Director, the Center for the Study of Hepatitis C from the year 2001–2018 at Rockefeller University.

Charles M Rice- Bio, Age, Ethnicity, Early Life, Education

Charles M Rice was born Charles Moen Rice on 25 August 1952, in Sacramento, CA, USA.

He is the single born of an insurance claims adjuster father and a housewife mother. Further, details of his family and siblings are not accessible.

Charles had always been interested in sort of nature, biology, and the outdoors, among many other things from his childhood.

He had an early interest in veterinary medicine and thus entered the field of virology.

However, after studying for a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Rice changed his focus to biology and basic research.

At the California Institute of Technology, he studied biochemistry in the laboratory of American virologist James Strauss.

Meanwhile, Rice conducted his graduate research on the Sindbis virus, the RNA virus that is carried by mosquitoes and causes fever and joint pain in humans.

Education

• California Institute of Technology, 1981–1985
• Ph.D. in biochemistry, 1981
  California Institute of Technology
• B.S. in zoology, 1974
  University of California, Davis

What are the body stats of Charles M. Rice?

Charles M Rice has an average height and average weight like other American adult males but his detailed body stat is not available.

He has grey hair, white skin, and blue eyes. Due to continuous work, research, and eye drainage, he ended up wearing spectacles.

Charles M Rice-Career & Research

The laureate demonstrated his research including a mouse with a human liver that allowed the first studies of HCV replication and tests of candidate drugs in a small animal model.

Meanwhile, the Rice lab has focused on viruses of global health concern. They kept an eye on viruses such as HCV, HBV, influenza A, dengue, yellow fever, Zika, and chikungunya.

They discovered that the host immune response to pathogens includes an innate, rapidly activated component involving a molecule called interferon.

Rice’s work includes the genetic sequence of structural proteins of the Sindbis virus laid the foundation for his work with other infectious viruses.

After earning a doctoral degree in 1981, Charles M Rice remained at Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow.

His deduction of the genome of the virus that causes yellow fever led to the establishment of the flavivirus family, which later included viruses that cause West Nile fever and dengue. His research facilitated the development of a yellow fever vaccine.

Further Work

In 1986 Charles M Rice joined the faculty at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

In the late 1980s, he shifted his focus to the development of a vaccine for hepatitis C, and in 1989, after Alter and Houghton reported the identification of a DNA clone of the HCV RNA genome, Rice became interested in studying HCV in the laboratory.

The virus, however, eluded laboratory culture. Rice later in 1989, subsequently generated a culturable version of the virus because the necessary genome was missing in the laboratory.

In 1996 he demonstrated the infectious nature of the cultured virus along with the introduction of the HCV genome.

In 2001 Rice moved to Rockefeller University, where he continued his studies of HCV and made the discovery of multiple proteins required for HCV entry into liver cells.

Also, he designed assays to test for drugs capable of blocking HCV replication. This led to the discovery of new therapeutic agents for hepatitis C. In the year 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in human patients approved the same.

 In 1997, Charles Rice and other research teams succeeded with this when they were able to show that a region in the virus’s genome was crucial in causing hepatitis.

The finding was an important step in developing blood tests and new medications that have saved millions of lives.

As of 2022, Charles M. Rice got a green signal from the FDA to initiate human trials on a new monoclonal antibody drug developed at Rockefeller.

Awards & Honors

• Rice was a recipient of the Robert Koch Prize (2015) and the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.
• He got Pew Biomedical Scholar, in 1986.
• Also, he was honored with M.W. Beijerinck Virology Prize, 2007.
• The Rockefeller University Distinguished Teaching Award, 2010
• Robert Koch Award, 2015
• InBev Baillet Latour Health Prize, 2016
• Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, 2016
• C. Chester Stock Award, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, 2017
• Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2020

Membership

• Charles M Rice was an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004) and the National Academy of Sciences (2005).
• Rice is a faculty member in the David Rockefeller Graduate Program, and the Tri-Institutional M.D.-Ph.D. Program.

Selected Publications

• Chung, H. et al. Human ADAR1 which prevents endogenous RNA from triggering the translational shutdown.
• Cell 172, 811–824 (2018). Wu, X. et al. Intrinsic immunity shape viral resistance of stem cells.
• Cell 172, 423–438 (2018).Billerbeck, E. et al. Mouse models of acute and chronic hepatitis C virus infection.
•  Science 357, 204–208 (2017).
• Robbiani, D.F. et al. Recurrent potent human neutralizing antibodies to Zika virus in Brazil and Mexico.
•  Cell 169, 597–609 (2017).
• Luna, J.M. et al. Hepatitis C virus RNA functionally sequester miR-122. Cell 160, 1099–1110 (2015).

Is Charles M. Rice active on social media?

Charles M Rice is active on social media with Rice Lab Twitter account with 7k followers since Oct 2020.

Wherein, he is not active on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube with his official account.

Rumors/ Controversy

Because of his continuous engagement in research work, he manages to keep himself away from rumors and controversies.

Trivia/ Facts

• Being a single child the son, Charles M Rice loved dogs and kept a few in order to be accompanied by, when he was a child.
• He had a bunch of puppies when he was just three years old.
• Rice won a prestigious Pew Charitable Trust scholarship for young biomedical researchers.

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Charles M. Rice's Birthday Dates