Two scientists who paved the way for widely used vaccines and another who discovered key players in cell growth have been awarded prestigious medical research awards.
The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation also announced Wednesday that it was giving its public service award to Planned Parenthood. Each award includes a $250,000 honorarium.
The foundation’s clinical research award is shared by Dr. Douglas Lowy and John Schiller of the U.S. National Cancer Institute. In the early 1990s they began work that would eventually lead to vaccines against human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes cervical cancer and some other cancers. They showed that a particular viral protein could provoke a strong immune response against the virus.
U.S. regulators approved vaccines that used their approach, called Gardasil and Cervarix, in 2006 and 2009. By 2015, millions of women around the world had been given HPV vaccines, the foundation said. In the U.S., HPV
