Nubia Munoz wins Canada Gairdner Global Health Award

The Gairdner Foundation is a Canadian organization that recognizes achievement in the biomedical sciences. Their 2009 awards were announced today. The Gairdner Foundation International Award, "traditionally considered a precursor to winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine", is going to three men: Shinya Yamanaka, Richard Losick, and Kazutoshi Mori. However this year's Global Health Award is going to a woman: Dr. Nubia Muñoz, Emeritus Professor of the National Cancer Institute of Columbia.

The Global Health Award "recognizes those who have made major scientific advances in any one of four areas' namely; basic science, clinical science or population or environmental health. These advances must have, or have potential to make a significant impact on health outcomes in the developing world." And Muñoz's work showing the role of Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) in the etiology of cervical cancer fits those requirements nicely.

Muñoz also won the 2008 Sir Richard Doll Prize in Epidemiology. The award site gives a nice explanation of the significance of her research :

First, she conducted an international series of case-control studies using modern laboratory techniques that ended up demonstrating that HPV infection by certain genotypes of HPV is unequivocally one the strongest cancer risk factors ever found. Her subsequent work also produced precise estimates of relative risks that permitted defining the HPV genotypes that had to be targeted for prevention. Likewise, it was from this enormous and persuasive series of case-control studies and from collaborative work that she had led as part of the International Biological Study of Cervical Cancer (IBSCC) that came the realization that HPV infection was not only the unequivocal central cause of cervical cancer but it should also be viewed as a necessary one No other cancer prevention paradigms (e.g., smoking-lung cancer, HBV-liver cancer) have this distinction.
[I've removed the footnote citations, click the link above to see the references.]

Her work helped persuade pharmaceutical companies that developing a vaccine for HPV was a worthwhile project.

And the role of HPV in cervical cancer has international importance: cervical cancer is the most common cancer in women in large parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia, and the third most frequent cancer in women worldwide. In spite of its prevalence, until the recent announcement of a vaccine against the strains of HPV that cause most cervical cancers, it got little media attention. Hopefully the vaccine will be made available - and affordable - to women in the countries where most of the 250,000 or so annual deaths from cervical cancer occur.The epidemiological studies lead by Muñoz are ultimately the reason why there is that hope of that at all.

Most of the information about Muñoz is in Spanish, so I haven't found anything about her background that I could actually understand. She received her decgree as a Doctor of Medicine and Surgery from the Faculy of Medicine at the University of Valle in Cali, Columbia in 1964. She was a fellow at the National Cancer Institute at NIH for two years in the late 1960s and did post graduate work in the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. She has been studying the epidemiology of cervical cancer for more than 30 years. I think her work pretty well speaks for itself.

More information:

• 2004 Premio Atlántico de Investigación de Cáncer
• Nubia Muñoz Calero Cancer Papiloma Humano Utero Epidemiologia Medicina Galeria Cientificos (Dec. 2006)
  
• 2008 Sir Richard Doll Prize in Epidemiology
• Nubia Muñoz, Long-Time IARC Staff Member, Gets Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Prize for Cancer Research (February 2009). Official announcement and biography (pdf).
  

Tags: Nubia Muñoz, Gairdner Global Health Award, epidemiology

Virologist Francoise Barre-Sinoussi Wins Nobel Prize

Today it was announced that Institut Pasteur virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi was one of three winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Barré-Sinoussi and her Institut Pasteur colleague Luc Montagnier were the first to characterize and isolate the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The award announcement details their achievement:

Following medical reports of a novel immunodeficiency syndrome in 1981, the search for a causative agent was on. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier isolated and cultured lymph node cells from patients that had swollen lymph nodes characteristic of the early stage of acquired immune deficiency. They detected activity of the retroviral enzyme reverse transcriptase, a direct sign of retrovirus replication. They also found retroviral particles budding from the infected cells. Isolated virus infected and killed lymphocytes from both diseased and healthy donors, and reacted with antibodies from infected patients. In contrast to previously characterized human oncogenic retroviruses, the novel retrovirus they had discovered, now known as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), did not induce uncontrolled cell growth. Instead, the virus required cell activation for replication and mediated cell fusion of T lymphocytes. This partly explained how HIV impairs the immune system since the T cells are essential for immune defence. By 1984, Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier had obtained several isolates of the novel human retrovirus, which they identified as a lentivirus, from sexually infected individuals, haemophiliacs, mother to infant transmissions and transfused patients. The significance of their achievements should be viewed in the context of a global ubiquitous epidemic affecting close to 1% of the population.

Barré-Sinoussi currently heads research at the Regulation of Retroviral Infections unit (Unité de Régulation des Infections Rétrovirales) and is working towards better understanding how HIV infection is naturally controlled by infected hosts, work that may help lead to the development of a an anti-HIV vaccine. In 2006 Barré-Sinoussi was elected to the WITI Hall of Fame, and spoke about her work on HIV. Watch the video.

Many of you may recall that there was a bitter dispute in the late 1980s over who had first isolated HIV: the French group at Institut Pasteur or Robert Gallo's research group at the National Cancer Institute. The "official" negotiated settlement was that both research teams had equal priority claims to the discovery and isolation of the virus, but clearly the Nobel Prize committee decided that the French scientists made a more significant contribution to the study of HIV. You can read more about the details of the controversy:

• Rawling A. "Montagnier, Gallo or both? On who the scientific community believes discovered HIV", New Scientist, 22 September 1990
• Crewdson J. "Report: Science subverted in AIDS dispute", Chicago Tribune 1 Jan 1995 (republished 6 October 2008)
  

Tags: Nobel Prize, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, HIV

The Impact of Women in Food and Agricultural Research

Today's Seeds for Tomorrow's Harvest is an exhibit from the Iowa State University Archives of Women in Science and Engineering that focuses on women who performed scientific research nutrition-related fields. Profiled scientists include Helen E. Clark (born 1912), Amy Daniels (born 1875), Jacqueline DuPont (born 1934), Ercel S. Eppright (born 1901), Pilar Garcia (born 1926), Allene Jeanes (born 1906), Belle Lowe (born 1886), Bernice Kunerth Watt (born 1910) and Evelyn Weber (born 1928).

These women aren't "nutritionists" in the popular sense of "people who give advice on nutrition". Instead they are chemists, biochemists, physiologists, and food scientists who work to understand how nutrients are used by the body and to improve the nutritional quality of our food supply. Their research accomplishments include determining dietary requirements for and metabolism of various nutrients, development of food additives such as xanthan gum, breeding special plants such as "high-oil" corn, and more.

In related out these video clips of Ruth Rogan Benerito, "pioneer in alfalfa breeding and genetics", and Janice M. Miller, who discovered the virus causing bovine leukemia, from their induction into the Agricultural Research Service Hall of Fame.