Charles M Rice is an American virologist. He is most known for isolating and discovering the Hepatitis C virus. During his award, he was a member of the Rockefeller University faculty. From 2001 until 2018, he was the Scientific and Executive Director of The Rockefeller University’s Center for the Study of Hepatitis C.

What is the Net worth of Charles M. Rice?

Famous Virologist Charles M. Rice’s net worth is estimated to be $1-5 million at the age of 67, according to Wikipedia, Forbes, IMDb, and other online sites. As a professional Virologist, he was able to make money. He is a citizen of the United States.

Early Life and Education of Charles M. Rice

Charles Moen Rice was born on August 25, 1952, in Sacramento, California, United States. He is the only child of his father, an insurance claims adjuster, and his mother, a housewife. Furthermore, no information about his family or siblings is available.

Charles has always been fascinated by nature, biology, and the outdoors, among other things, since he was a child. He was interested in veterinary medicine since he was a child, thus he went into the subject of virology. Rice shifted his concentration to biology and basic science after spending a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Charles M. Rice studied biochemistry in the laboratory of American virologist James Strauss at the California Institute of Technology. Meanwhile, Rice was working on his master’s thesis on the Sindbis virus, an RNA virus spread by mosquitos that causes fever and joint pain in people.

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

Body Measurement

Charles is of average height and weight for an adult guy in the United States, but his precise body stats are unavailable. His hair is grey, his skin is white, and his eyes are blue. He had to stop wearing spectacles because of his constant work, research, and eye drainage.

Career & Research of Charles M. Rice

The laureate presented his findings, which included the first investigations of HCV replication and tests of prospective medications in a small animal model using a mouse with a human liver. Meanwhile, the Rice lab has been working on viruses that are of worldwide relevance. HCV, HBV, influenza A, dengue, yellow fever, Zika, and chikungunya were among the viruses they monitored. They discovered that the innate, rapidly activated component of the host immune response to infections involves a chemical called interferon.

Rice’s work with the Sindbis virus’s genetic sequence of structural proteins established the groundwork for his work with other pathogenic viruses. Rice stayed at Caltech as a postdoctoral scholar after receiving his doctorate in 1981. His work on the genome of the yellow fever virus resulted in the formation of the flavivirus family, which later includes viruses that cause West Nile fever and dengue fever. His work aided in the creation of a yellow fever vaccine.

Additional Work

Rice began teaching at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in 1986. Rice’s focus switched to the creation of a hepatitis C vaccine in the late 1980s, and after Alter and Houghton reported the identification of a DNA clone of the HCV RNA genome in 1989, Rice got interested in studying HCV in the lab. However, the virus eluded laboratory culture. Because the essential genome was unavailable in the laboratory, Rice created a culturable variant of the virus later in 1989. He introduced the HCV genome and established the infectious nature of the cultivated virus in 1996.

Rice moved to Rockefeller University in 2001 to continue his HCV research and find numerous proteins necessary for HCV entrance into liver cells. He also created assays to look for medicines that could stop HCV replication. As a result, new hepatitis C treatment drugs have been discovered. The United States Food and Drug Administration approved it for use in human patients in 2013.

Charles Rice and other research teams were able to demonstrate that a region in the virus’s DNA was critical in generating hepatitis in 1997. The discovery paved the way for new blood tests and treatments that have saved millions of lives. The FDA gave Charles M. Rice permission to begin human trials on a novel monoclonal antibody therapy developed at Rockefeller in 2022.

Honors and Awards

• Rice was a recipient of the Robert Koch Prize (2015) and the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.
• He got Pew Biomedical Scholar, 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

• He 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 sequesters miR-122. Cell 160, 1099–1110 (2015).

Social Media

Since October 2020, he has been active on social media with the Rice Lab Twitter account, which has 7k followers. In addition, he does not use his official account on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.

Controversy/Rumors

He manages to stay away from speculations and controversies because of his constant involvement in study.

Trivia/ Facts

• Being a single child of the son, he 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.

Quick Facts of Charles M. Rice