South Africa’s infectious disease specialists, husband and wife team Quarraisha and Salim Abdool Karim, are among the nominees for the international Lasker Awards, a highly regarded set of prizes given for advances in medicine and public health research.
The 2024 Lasker Medical Research Awards are divided into three categories, and will be presented at a gala ceremony in New York on Friday.
The Abdool Karims are to receive the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award in recognition of their work to end Africa’s HIV epidemic. The two have led decades of work from their home in Durban, where they founded the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research and have nurtured two generations of African scientists.
The New York Times reports that the couple met as young researchers, and were activists against white rule, determined to use science to address the country’s vast health disparities.
While studying in New York in the late 1980s, they saw the ravages of untreated HIV in South Africa, Salim Abdool Karim said, and so they went home and conducted the first studies showing that infections were spreading fast among the population – and that young black women were most vulnerable. Their findings grimly foretold the devastation that was to come.
“We were scientists taking on the challenge not just for South Africa but for all of sub-Saharan Africa, but we weren’t doing it in New York or Washington, we were doing it while immersed in these vulnerable communities that was our source of inspiration,” Quarraisha Abdool Karim said.
The Abdool Karims have supervised years of research into prevention technologies, such as vaginal gels carrying drugs to kill HIV, and potential vaccines.
These efforts failed, repeatedly, thwarted by the virus. In a recent conversation, Salim Abdool Karim jokingly called HIV “a career killer”, adding, “It’s lucky nobody told us when we started that 35 years later we would still be trying to prevent the virus from spreading.”
Quarraisha said that while the failures had been discouraging, they always added to the body of knowledge. “Every time we had negative results, we went back into the lab and said, ‘OK, what did we learn?’” she said.
Recently the Abdool Karims’ research centre was part of a clinical trial of a twice-yearly injectable antiviral drug that produced a stunning success – total protection against new infections in young women who had received the shot. Quarraisha said the results were a welcome shock after so many years of trying.
“That was a wonderful challenge,” she said.
Other awardees included experts whose research helped lead to the discovery of a new class of obesity drugs, and a scientist who discovered a way the body protects itself from infectious diseases and cancer.
The Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award is given for a fundamental discovery that opens a new area of biomedical science. This year’s award honours the discovery of the cGAS enzyme that senses foreign and self DNA, solving the 100-year-old mystery of how DNA stimulates immune and inflammatory responses. The recipient is Zhijian Chen (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre, Dallas).
The Lasker DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award is given for a major advance that improves the lives of many thousands of people. This year’s award recognises the discovery and development of GLP-1-based drugs that have revolutionised the treatment of obesity.
Recipients are Joel Habener (Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston), Svetlana Mojsov (The Rockefeller University, New York City); and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen (Novo Nordisk, Denmark).
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More recognition, accolades for Abdool Karims, with award from Japan
Abdool Karim and Fauci share the 2020 John Maddox Prize