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3 scientists, Planned Parenthood win prestigious Lasker medical prizes

Three scientists and Planned Parenthood have won prestigious medical awards from the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation

By Associated Press
Published: September 6, 2017, 6:00am

NEW YORK (AP) — 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 today 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.

U.S. regulators approved vaccines that used their approach, called Gardasil and Cervarix, in 2006 and 2009.

The Lasker award for basic medical research went to Michael N. Hall of the Biozentrum Institute at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Starting in the 1990s, he discovered and studied proteins that serve as a master regulator of cell growth, one that responds to the availability of nutrients. Defects related to those “TOR” proteins contribute to diabetes and cancer, and scientists are developing anti-cancer drugs based on them, the foundation said.

In awarding its public service prize to Planned Parenthood, the foundation said it had provided “essential health services and reproductive care to millions of women for more than a century.”

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