WASHINGTON, Sept 9 — Three US researchers and the NGO Doctors Without Borders have won prestigious Lasker Awards, sometimes referred to as “America’s Nobels,” the foundation behind the awards announced yesterday.
The awards, which are given out annually to recognize major contributions to medical science, come with a US$250,000 (RM 1,076,625) prize and will be presented at a ceremony in New York on September 18.
Doctors without Borders was honored for showing remarkable leadership in taking on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa “while others sat on the sidelines,” Alfred Sommer, chair of the Lasker Foundation’s Public Service Award jury, said in a statement yesterday.
The group, he said, not only worked on the ground to contain the outbreak but “urged international governments to take this outbreak seriously.”
The geneticist Evelyn Witkin, 94, of Rutgers University, and Stephen Elledge, 59, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, will be honoured for their work laying the foundation of our understanding of how cells detect and repair damage to their DNA.
The University of Texas immunologist James Allison, 67, will be honored for developing new cancer therapies that rely on the body’s own immune system to fight tumors.
Those therapies have been credited with extending the lives of hundreds of patients with metastatic melanoma, a form of cancer that without that treatment kills half of patients within a year.
“This year’s Laureates have opened up new frontiers into genetic processes essential to all life; developed novel cancer therapies that unleash the immune system; and worked with great dedication to contain a devastating Ebola epidemic,” Lasker Foundation president Claire Pomeroy said in the statement.
“They remind us all that investing in biological sciences and medical research is crucial for our future.”
The awards have been given out since 1945 and 86 former winners have also won a Nobel Prize, according to the foundation. — AFP
