By Clinical Informatics News Staff

September 6, 2017 | The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation today announced the winners of the 2017 Lasker Awards: Michael N. Hall for basic medical research; and Douglas R. Lowy and John T. Schiller for clinical research.

“This year’s honorees have provided insights into fundamental aspects of biology and have saved or improved millions of lives,” said Claire Pomeroy, President of the Lasker Foundation, in a press release. “The decades-long work of this year’s Lasker Medical Research Awardees illustrates how critical it is to provide scientists with robust funding so they can pursue rigorous research.”

“This year’s Lasker Medical Research Awards illustrate the power of biomedical investigation to advance human health whether scientists probe basic questions that reveal unforeseen truths or pursue goal-directed projects,” said Joseph L. Goldstein, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Chair of the Lasker Medical Research Awards Jury.  “Michael Hall showed that TOR proteins control cell growth in response to nutrients and growth factors and thus established that growth is a highly regulated process that is independent of the cell division cycle.  Douglas Lowy and John Schiller discovered that a single protein from the capsule of papillomaviruses can self-assemble into virus-like particles, paving the way for HPV vaccines that prevent cervical and other cancers.” 

The 2017 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award:

Michael N. Hall for discoveries concerning the nutrient-activated TOR proteins and their central role in the metabolic control of cell growth

The 2017 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award honors Michael N. Hall, 64, Biozentrum, University of Basel, who discovered the nutrient-activated TOR proteins and their central role in the metabolic control of cell growth.

Disruption of the TOR network contributes to numerous human illnesses, including diabetes and cancer, and has been implicated in a wide range of age-related disorders.

By showing that the TOR system adjusts cell size in response to the availability of raw materials, Hall revealed an unanticipated linchpin of normal cell physiology. Prior to these discoveries, the research community thought of cell growth as a passively regulated, spontaneous process that occurs when nutrients are available, without the help of an underlying regulatory system. These scientific breakthroughs have broadened our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that underlie growth, development, and aging.

The 2017 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award:

Douglas R. Lowy and John T. Schiller for technological advances that enabled development of HPV vaccines for prevention of cervical cancer and other tumors caused by human papillomaviruses

The 2017 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award honors Douglas R. Lowy, 75, and John T. Schiller, 64, both from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Their technological advances enabled the development of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, which prevent cervical cancer and other tumors.

HPV infection causes virtually all cases of cervical cancer, which is the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide. More than 500,000 new cervical cancers are diagnosed annually, and each year, more than 250,000 women die from the malignancy.

Lowy and Schiller’s research on animal and human papillomaviruses enabled the development of a vaccine against the high-risk HPV16 type, which gives rise to a large percentage of HPV malignancies. They showed that the vaccine is effective in animals and conducted the first clinical trial of an HPV16 vaccine in humans, demonstrating its safety and ability to trigger a strong immune response. Two pharmaceutical companies, Merck & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), pursued Lowy and Schiller’s findings to develop vaccines that combat HPV16 as well as additional HPV types. By 2015, 59 million women worldwide and 20 million in North America had received an HPV vaccine.