Nobel Prize in medicine given for HIV, HPV discoveries
Three Europeans recognized for linking viruses to AIDS, cervical cancer
By Nathan Seppa
The 2008 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine will be shared among three European researchers for their pivotal work in identifying the roles of sexually transmitted viruses in causing cervical cancer and AIDS.
Half of the $1.4 million prize goes to Harald zur Hausen of the GermanCancerResearchCenter in Heidelberg for his discovery that the human papillomavirus, or HPV, causes cervical cancer. His work in the 1970s and 1980s laid the foundation for a full onslaught against HPV. In recent years, scientists have developed and made available for commercial use two vaccines against HPV, one marketed by Merck as Gardasil and the other marketed by GlaxoSmithKline as Cervarix. The vaccines are the first to guard against a cancer, preventing key strains of HPV infection that cause most cervical cancers. HPV has since been linked to other cancers as well.
The other half of the 2008 medical Nobel prize will be split by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for work that culminated in the early 1980s with the discovery that a strange virus, later called the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, was the cause of AIDS. It is the first Nobel given specifically for HIV research.
Their work, done at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was later confirmed in the United States by Robert Gallo and his team at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., although that work ignited a controversy, which simmered throughout the 1980s, over the rightful owner of the “discoverer” title. In any case, no one disputes that the early HIV findings cleared the way for a test for the virus, for blood supply screening and for the development of drugs to combat HIV in patients.
In his work on human papillomavirus, zur Hausen toiled against a prevailing notion taught in medical schools at the time — that a herpes virus probably caused cervical cancer. Using a new technology developed in the 1970s called recombinant DNA, he failed to find any herpes DNA in cervical tumors.
Instead, he isolated HPV DNA from cervical tumors in the lab, and dubbed the viral strain HPV-16. His team was also able to look for this particular strain of the virus in other cervical cancers, and found it in roughly half of such tumors. When some women with cervical cancer turned out to have a form of HPV other than this strain, the team cloned that and named it HPV-18.