HPV vaccine discoverer to lead NCI after Varmus exit
This article was originally published in Scrip
With the exit at the end of this month from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of Dr Harold Varmus, who is stepping down as director after five years to open a research laboratory at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and serve as an adviser to its dean, Dr Douglas Lowy, the agency's deputy director, will now take the reins as acting chief.
Dr Lowy, along with Dr John Schiller, deputy laboratory chief and head of the NCI's Neoplastic Disease Section, discovered virus-like particles and related technologies that led to the generation of effective vaccines that specifically targeted the human papillomavirus (HPV) and its related cancers.
The pair of researchers in 1992 discovered that a single papillomavirus protein, known as L1, could self-assemble into non-infectious VLPs that closely resembled the outer surface of the actual virus and were highly capable of producing an antibody response that inactivated the corresponding virus.
They also discovered that the L1s of the major cancer-associated HPVs behaved similarly, provided that the L1 genes were derived from virus producing lesions, according to the NCI.
Drs Lowy and Schiller also developed widely employed tests for measuring HPV infection-inhibiting antibodies and conducted the first controlled clinical trial of an HPV VLP vaccine.
They are listed as the inventors on the government-owned patents covering those discoveries, which are licensed to Merck and GlaxoSmithKline for their HPV vaccines.
This past November, Drs Lowy and Schiller were awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony (scripintelligence.com, 21 November 2014).
The two NCI doctors also were honored in September 2013 by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America as recipients of the group's Research & Hope Awards (scripintelligence.com, 11 September 2013).
Dr Varmus, a co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes, also is the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – running the agency from 1993-1999 under President Bill Clinton.
But the NIH's current chief, Dr Francis Collins, called Dr Varmus back in July 2010 to oversee the NCI.
Dr Varmus' "breadth and depth of expertise in biomedical research is unparalleled, and he's been a tremendous colleague to me and invaluable to the agency," Dr Collins said.
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