Nobel Prize for Medicine Goes to HIV, HPV Discoverers

James Owen
for National Geographic News

October 6, 2008

The 2008 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been split between scientists who discovered the virus that causes AIDS and the virologist who identified human papilloma virus (HPV) as the cause of cervical cancer.

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, today announced that half of the 10-million-Swedish-kronor (1.4-million-U.S.-dollar) prize goes to French researchers Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi for identifying human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.

Joint winner of the prize is German HPV discoverer Harald zur Hausen. Nobel Prize committee member Jan Andersson of the Karolinska Institute said the joint award was "for the discovery of two viruses of great importance in diseases for humans."

AIDS Detectives

Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi are credited with discovering HIV at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1983. The researchers described the virus after identifying it in the swollen lymph nodes of infected patients.

The work revealed that HIV attacks the body's infection-fighting white blood cells, triggering AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).

Sufferers had caught highly unusual diseases, such as rare skin cancers and lung infections.

AIDS has killed around 25 million people worldwide, orphaning more than 2 million children in Africa alone.

Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi's research was vital to understanding the disease and to the subsequent development of antiviral drugs for combating HIV infection, the Nobel Prize committee stated.

While many scientists were crucial to early AIDS research, the Nobel specifically recognizes the initial isolation of the virus, said committee member Göran Hansson of the Karolinska Institute.

While credit for the HIV breakthrough has been a source of controversy in the past, "it's completely evident by now that this discovery was made in Paris," Hansson said.

(Related: "HIV/AIDS Emerged as Early as 1880s" [October 1, 2008].)

HPV Sleuth

Joint Nobel Prize winner zur Hausen, of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, proposed in the 1970s that HPV was the cause of cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.

Going against the prevailing scientific view, zur Hausen searched for minute genetic traces of the virus in cancerous tumors.

The virologist's ten-year study eventually uncovered the DNA of two types of HPV in cancer patients. His team cloned the viruses in 1984.

The Nobel Prize committee noted that HPV can be found in 99.7 percent of women with cervical cancer, which affects some 500,000 every year.

Zur Hausen's breakthrough discovery led to the development of HPV vaccines that provide 95 percent protection from the high-risk HPV16 and HPV18 variants.

Peter Stern, head of immunology at the Paterson Institute of Cancer Research in Manchester, England, said that when zur Hausen began his research, cervical cancer studies focused on other viruses, such as herpes.

"Hes universally acknowledged as the person who forged the basic studies that underlie not only our ability to understand the disease, but also to prevent it," Stern said.

HPV vaccines are especially important because tests for detecting early signs of the cancer arent available in many countries, he added.

The Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1901 as directed in the will of chemist, engineer, and dynamite-inventor Alfred Nobel.

This year's prizes in physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and economics will be announced over the next two weeks.

The awards are officially handed out each year at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.