Nobel for HIV discovery

The decision to award one half of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine to the French researchers who discovered the human immunodeficiency virus may have finally ended the long debate over who best deserved the credit.

Institut Pasteur researcher Professor Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and her colleague Professor Luc Montagnier, now director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research in Paris, were jointly awarded one-half of the prize for their 1984 discovery of the retrovirus.

Professor Harald zur Hausen, former chairman and scientific director of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, won the other half of the prize for his then-controversial finding that the human papilloma virus caused cervical cancer.

The decision to award the prize to Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi, and to exclude the US scientist Professor Robert Gallo, is somewhat controversial. Both teams claimed credit for the discovery in the 1980s, with legal action being taken to protect valuable patents.

Both sides eventually agreed to split any proceeds from diagnostic tests.

The French team suspected the new virus that was causing a novel immunodeficiency syndrome, later to be called AIDS, was a retrovirus.

They obtained several isolates of the retrovirus, which they called LAV, and found it required cell activation for replication and mediated cell fusion of T lymphocytes.

“This partly explained how HIV impairs the immune system since the T cells are essential for immune defence,” the Nobel committee said.

“HIV has generated a novel pandemic. Never before has science and medicine been so quick to discover, identify the origin and provide treatment for a new disease entity.”

The French team announced in 1983 that they had discovered LAV. Gallo and his team at the University of Maryland were also racing to track down the virus and announced in 1984 that they had discovered a virus they called HTLV-3, with evidence that it caused AIDS.

The race to discover the virus is described in Randy Shilts’ 1987 book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, which was later made into a well-received film.

In a statement, Gallo congratulated the winners and said he was gratified to read that Montagnier had expressed that Gallo was equally deserving of the prize. The head of the Nobel Committee, Bertil Fredholm, said it was obvious the discovery “had been made in France”.

zur Hausen first postulated that HPV caused cervical cancer in the 1970s, to the disagreement of many. He worked on this theory for a decade, discovering and then cloning two strains of the virus, HPV16 and 18, from cervical cancer patients.

These two types are responsible for 70 per cent of cervical cancers. An HPV vaccine, Gardasil, was developed by Australian-based researchers Professor Ian Frazer and Dr Jian Zhou and is now available.