Health

07 Apr 10

Gairdner Award winners Peter Ratcliffe (left) and Nick White (right).

Professors Peter Ratcliffe and Nick White of Oxford University have been named winners of Canada Gairdner Awards for 2010, one of the most prestigious prizes for medical research.

The $100,000 awards have a track record of identifying significant and groundbreaking work early on. Since the Canada Gairdner Awards were created in 1959, there have been 298 awardees. Of these, 76 have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Professor Nick White, who is director of the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok, is to receive the 2010 Canada Gairdner Global Health Award – the first major international award that recognizes individual contributions to health in the developing world.

Professor White proved that artemisinin, a compound derived from a plant used for over a thousand years in Chinese medicine, is a highly effective treatment for malaria. Artemisinin represents the single most effective and fastest-acting treatment for malaria that we have. Professor White also provided the scientific basis for the use of artemisinin in combination with other treatments to prevent malaria resistance. These drugs are now recommended as first-line treatments throughout the malaria-affected world.

He said, ‘Grant support can be very conservative and there is often little support for really innovative research. The Canada Gairdner prize gives us the freedom to pursue exciting ideas that are right on the edge.’

Peter Ratcliffe, the Nuffield Professor of Medicine at Oxford, is named a winner of a Canada Gairdner award along with William Kaelin Jr of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in Boston and Gregg Semenza of The Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore. They have all played roles in identifying how cells in the body monitor and respond to oxygen levels.

At the cellular level, oxygen plays a role in a huge range of diseases from heart disease to cancer. The work of these researchers could pave the way to therapies that manipulate oxygen, for example, by improving the supply of oxygen in people with cardiovascular disease.

This year’s other winners are William Catterall at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, Pierre Chambon at the Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire in Strasbourg, and Cal Stiller of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

Dr John Dirks, President and Scientific Director of the Gairdner Foundation, which presents the awards, said, ‘These awards pay tribute to the passion, dedication and vision that drive these extraordinary individuals to push the boundaries of medical science. Their work has changed the face of medicine, from the discovery of the mechanisms underlying electrical signaling in the brain, to the validation of an ancient Chinese remedy as a treatment for malaria.’