Lasker Awards Honor Three Researchers

Two scientists whose work led to development of the first human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, and a third who discovered a key protein involved in cell growth, are recipients of this year's Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation awards. The prizes, which come with an honorarium of $250,000, are among the nation's most prestigious honors in medicine.

Douglas R. Lowy, MD, acting director of the NCI, and John T. Schiller, PhD, deputy chief of the Laboratory of Cellular Oncology at the NCI, share the foundation's 2017 Lasker–DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. The duo's research on animal and human papillomaviruses led to the development of a vaccine against HPV-16, which laid the foundation for FDA approval in 2006 and 2009 of two widely used HPV vaccines: Gardasil (Merck) and Cervarix (GlaxoSmithKline). HPV causes most cervical cancers.

“This is the payoff for long-term funding of medical research by the public sector,” said Lowy, who has collaborated with Schiller for more than 30 years, during a news conference. “We are now testing whether a single dose of the vaccine can induce long-term protection, a change that could be transformative, particularly in low-resource countries where the majority of cervical cancers occur.”

The HPV virus also causes the majority of oropharynx cancers, found predominantly in men, notes head and neck cancer specialist Jennifer Grandis, MD, associate vice chancellor of clinical and translational research at the University of California, San Francisco. “If every boy and girl were vaccinated before exposure to HPV, we could probably eliminate these cancers.”

Lowy and Schiller forged a path for the development of HPV vaccines, says Denise Galloway, PhD, associate director of human biology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, whose research focuses on HPV infections.

“They developed assays which have been incredibly useful in terms of being able to neutralize antibodies in vitro and in vivo, and they made those assays widely available,” she says. “That's allowed us to easily determine if someone who has been vaccinated has antibodies that are protective for infection.”

The Albert Lasker Basic MedicalResearch Award went to Michael N. Hall, PhD, a cell biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who discovered the TOR pathway and its role in regulating cell growth and metabolism. Hall demonstrated that the TOR system controls cell size in response to the availability of nutrients and that disruption of the pathway contributes to cancer and diabetes, as well as age-related disorders.

“Our discovery is an example of the importance of curiosity-driven research,” said Hall during the news conference. “We went off on a tangent and took an unusual and risky approach, and that enabled us to discover a protein that plays a central role in the function of a cell.”

In the 1980s, Hall took the unique approach of studying immunosuppressants in yeast and found that one drug in that class, rapamycin, blocks proliferation of yeast cells. He went on to identify two previously unknown genes—TOR1 and TOR2—and to demonstrate that TOR-deficient cells go into a dormant state when nutrients are scarce. His work underlies the development of mTOR inhibitor therapies, such as everolimus (Afinitor; Novartis), approved to treat advanced breast cancer and several other types of cancer.

Hall's work opened up a new field of research by identifying two structurally and functionally distinct TOR complexes, notes Kun-Liang Guan, PhD, a professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego, Moores Cancer Institute, who studies the mTOR pathway.

“Cell growth—mass accumulation and size increase—and cell division are two of the most fundamental aspects of cell biology,” says Guan. “Hall's discoveries have advanced not only basic biology but also therapeutics by targeting TOR for human diseases.” –Janet Colwell

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