For decades, a Metro Detroit neurosurgeon saved the lives of his patients. Now, Dr. Ken Casey needs a liver transplant. After his diagnosis during the summer of 2021, the entire family has been trying to find an organ donor.

Alter, Charles M. Rice, and Michael Houghton who jointly won the Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday, Oct. 5, 2020, for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus. “For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world,” the Nobel Committee said in announcing the prize in Stockholm. Without such treatment, the virus can lead to permanent scarring of the liver, liver cancer or the need for a transplant. Later, Rice developed lab tools and methods that confirmed the hepatitis C virus could cause liver disease in chimpanzees and humans, directly contributing knowledge that led to tests and treatments. Hepatitis C drugs were around $40,000 when they first came out less than a decade ago.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - There has been a dramatic shift in how doctors use donated kidneys infected with hepatitis C that used to be thrown away. Hepatitis C is a viral infection that causes liver inflammation, sometimes leading to serious damage. Patients who received infected kidneys had nearly the same function as those who received uninfected kidneys, the study said. Until a few years ago, there weren't really good options to treat hepatitis C. Now, there are drugs with high cure rates, Potluri said. But nearly 40% of the hepatitis C-infected kidneys donated between January 2018 and March 2019 were discarded.