The Nobel prize for medicine this year has been awarded to HIV and HPV pioneers: Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of France (HIV) and Harald zur Hausen of Germany (HPV).
"Luc Montagnier,
director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, and
Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Institut Pasteur won half the prize of
10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) for discovering the virus that
has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the 1980s.
Dr. Harald zur Hausen of the University of Duesseldorf and a former director of the German Cancer Research Center shared the other half of the prize for work that went against the established opinion about the cause of cervical cancer.
"The three laureates have discovered two new viruses of great
importance and the result of that has led to an improved global
health," said Jan Andersson, a member of the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute.
The discoveries made it possible to diagnose both infections, and led
to the development of two vaccines that prevent cervical cancer, and
more than 20 drugs that can keep HIV patients healthy."
But this isn't without controversy, as US researcher Robert Gallo feels that he should share credit with the French scientists for the discovery of HIV.
"U.S. researcher Dr. Robert Gallo was locked in a dispute with
Montagnier in the 1980s over the relative importance of their roles in
groundbreaking research into HIV and its role in AIDS. Gallo told The
Associated Press that he was disappointed at not being included in the
prize.
Montagnier told the AP in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he
is attending an international AIDS conference, that he was still
optimistic about conquering the disease.
The prize, he said, "encourages us all to keep going until we reach the goal at the end of this effort."
Montagnier said he wished the prize had also gone to Gallo.
"It is certain that he deserved this as much as us two," he said."
Nobel prizes cannot be shared by more than three awardees, and in this case, while Gallo's contribution to establishing the connection between HIV and AIDS and the technical advances to isolate the HIV were seminal, the Nobel prize committee decided that the work performed by Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi in first discovering and characterizing the virus was more deserving.
Gallo's dispute with Montaigner over who should get credit for the HIV discovery goes back to the late '80's:
His dispute with Montagnier reached such a level in 1987 that
then-President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of
France penned an agreement dividing millions of dollars in royalties
from the AIDS blood test. The settlement led to an agreement that
officially credited the Gallo and Montagnier labs with co-discovering
the virus.
In the 1990s, however, the U.S. government
acknowledged that the French deserved a greater share of the royalties.
The admission solidified the French position that Montagnier had
isolated the virus in 1983, a year before Gallo.
It might be that Eurocentricism played a role in this selection (i.e. in keeping it between the French researchers, rather than splitting between Montagnier and Gallo), but disappointments and surprises aside, it definitely makes an interesting case for how to honor all those who were excluded from these prizes, despite their significant contributions to the various fields that are awarded Nobel prizes.
A little more detail about Harald zur Hausen's discovery that the Human Papilloma Virus is an etiologic agent in a variety of cancers, including cervical cancer, based on which vaccines have been recently developed and approved for use in the general population here in another pre-Nobel article:
In his early work, zur Hausen demonstrated that Burkitt's lymphoma
cells contained Epstein-Barr viral DNA, thus proving that viruses can
persist in human tumor cells, and are associated with tumor growth. Zur
Hausen and his colleagues were also able to demonstrate the association
of Epstein-Barr virus in epithelial cells of nasopharyngeal carcinoma.
...
In the 1970s and 1980s, zur Hausen provided the key investigative
findings that led to the recognition that certain types of HPV are the
etiologic agents of cervical cancer. This observation and the detailed
studies that followed provided the basis for the extensive
epidemiologic studies that independently validated the importance of
these findings worldwide. Zur Hausen's subsequent research on the
immunogenicity of this virus set the stage for the development of a
vaccine.
"Dr. zur Hausen is responsible for a body of scientific research that
laid the foundation for one of the most important events of the past
year in cancer research and public health - the approval of an
effective vaccine for HPV," said Margaret Foti, Ph.D., M.D. (h.c.),
AACR chief executive officer. "We expect this vaccine will lead to a
marked decrease in the incidence of cervical cancer and ultimately
protect countless young women from this disease."
Zur Hausen's work has also linked HPV to several other cancers
including laryngeal carcinoma, penile carcinoma, and epidermal
dysplasia.
Gardasil, a controversial vaccine to guard against the HPV strains causing the majority of cervical cancer still hogs the limelight occasionally, more due to the reports of dire adverse reactions (dizziness, neuropathies or worse) which have been reported in a tiny fraction of the several million shots administered so far. Dr.Zur Hausen's work was undoubtedly the precursor which led to this vaccine being developed as a possible way to combat cervical cancer, even as its efficacy as a preventative therapy is still out before the jury.
Note: For those who might not have seen this, Ruchira's husband Dr. Sudhir Paul's research in discovering a possible avenue of attack against the HIV, is highlighted in this post on A.B.
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