Nobel Prizes awarded for AIDS, cancer virus research

Two French scientists who discovered the AIDS virus and a German who defied convention in showing a viral cause for cervical cancer shared the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for breakthroughs that have led to lifesaving drugs and a vaccine.

Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier of France were cited for their discovery of HIV in 1983. They shared the award with Germany's Harald zur Hausen, who found that certain human papilloma viruses cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women worldwide.

Zur Hausen discovered that two types of HPV promote cervical cancer, bucking a prevailing idea that blamed a different kind of virus. He made the viruses available to the scientific community. That led to the development of HPV vaccines to prevent cervical cancer. Vaccination is recommended for millions of young women and girls in the U.S.

The discovery the AIDS virus by Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi was crucial to understanding the biology of AIDS and how to fight it, the Nobel Assembly said in its citation issued in Stockholm, Sweden. Since the scientists' work in the early 1980s, millions of people with HIV are still alive thanks to new drug treatments.

The announcement of the Nobel winners was notable for one scientist who was not named: U.S. researcher Dr. Robert Gallo, who almost 25 years ago also claimed credit for the discovery of HIV and who played a big role in research of the disease.

The dual claims led to a high-profile dispute between Gallo and Montagnier. They agreed publicly in 1987 to share the discovery credit equally, as part of a settlement of patent claims for an AIDS blood test. But Gallo later said he'd found that his lab's cultures had accidentally become contaminated with AIDS virus from Montagnier's lab.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a prominent AIDS researcher and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., said the French scientists clearly identified HIV first and deserved the honor.

Gallo would have been "an obvious choice" to be included on the Nobel if the prize's rules had allowed for a fourth recipient, Fauci said. That's because of Gallo's role in showing HIV causes AIDS and in a technical advance that allowed HIV to be isolated, he said.

Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, told The Associated Press that it was "a disappointment" not to be included in the Nobel. But he said all three of the winners deserved the honor.

Reached in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he is attending an international AIDS conference, Montagnier said he wished Gallo had been included in the prize.

"It is certain that he deserved this as much as us two," he said.

Montagnier said the prize "encourages us all to keep going until we reach the goal at the end of this effort."

He said he remains optimistic about conquering AIDS. Progress in developing a vaccine to prevent it has been frustrating.

Barre-Sinoussi said that when she and Montagnier isolated the virus 25 years ago they hoped they would be able to prevent the global AIDS epidemic that followed.

Last year, more than 33 million people worldwide were living with HIV and 2.1 million died of AIDS, according to global health estimates. Two-thirds of HIV infections are in sub-Saharan Africa.

"We naively thought that the discovery of the virus would allow us to quickly learn more about it, to develop diagnostic tests -- which has been done -- and to develop treatments, which has also been done to a large extent and, most of all, develop a vaccine that would prevent the global epidemic," Barre-Sinoussi told the AP by telephone from Cambodia.

The Nobel citation noted that the French researchers' work had "substantially decreased spread of the disease and dramatically increased life expectancy among treated patients."

Barre-Sinoussi, 61, is director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Union at the Institut Pasteur in France, while Montagnier, 76, is the director for the World Foundation for AIDS Research in Prevention, also in the French capital.

In honoring Zur Hausen, the Nobel Assembly said he "went against current dogma" when he found that some kinds of human papilloma virus, or HPV, caused cervical cancer. He was able to detect the DNA of HPV in tumors, and uncovered a family of HPV types, only some of which cause cancer.

The HPV virus, transmitted by sexual contact, causes genital warts that sometimes develop into cancer. The new cancer vaccines protect against the HPV strains that cause most cervical cancers.

When reached by the AP, Zur Hausen, 72, of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg said: "I'm not prepared for this. We're drinking a little glass of bubbly right now."