The lowdown: Results from a study of more than 12,000 women, presented at the annual meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America, show that the vaccine Gardasil prevented precancerous lesions and early forms of cervical cancers in 97–100% of the women who received the vaccine. Gardasil targets two strains of human papillomaviruses (HPV), types 16 and 18, which account for 70% of cervical cancers, and types 6 and 11, which account for 90% of genital warts. It is good news for Merck as this is one of the company's most important pipeline products, but if approved (sometime in 2006) the predicted blockbuster status is not completely guaranteed. First of all, GlaxoSmithKline has a similar vaccine in production called Cervarix, which targets the two HPV strains responsible for cervical cancer. If all goes well, GSK will file Cervarix for approval in Europe in 2006. Another issue is the sensitive nature of the vaccine's target market. As HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, prevention against cervical cancer means inoculating women before they become sexually active. Promoting a vaccine that protects against sexually transmitted disease to parents of young girls could be difficult, but Merck says that the ability to prevent against cancer will overcome any social or moral issues.
The lowdown: Yves Chauvin, Robert Grubbs and Richard Schrock have been named as joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their role in the development of olefin metathesis. The reaction changed the way chemists think about making pharmaceuticals, plastics and herbicides by finding a way to rearrange carbon–carbon double bonds. The process had been known in the petrochemical industry since the 1950s, but Chauvin, from the French Oil Institute in Rueil–Malmaison, near Paris, was the first to show how a metathesis reaction actually works. Schrock, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the first person to find a catalyst that would allow the reaction to run, and Grubbs, from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, came up with more stable forms of catalyst that were easy to handle in the lab. The path from curious observation to applied science also won Barry Marshall and Robin Warren their Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, although theirs was a more controversial route. Their idea that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori could cause stomach ulcers was deemed heretical in the 1980s, when the conventional wisdom said that acid secretion was the underlying cause. But through sheer frustration, and a combination of dogged persistence and methodical science, Marshall and Warren convinced a skeptical medical and pharmaceutical community that ulcers are caused by bacterial infection, and therefore treatable with antibiotics rather than more expensive drugs blocking acid secretion. Marshall, from the University of Western Australia, even took part in the ultimate cause-and-effect experiment, swallowing an H. pylori culture, and a week later suffered a violent episode of gastritis that leads to ulcers. Their Nobel Prize shows how science will reward even the most maverick idea if there is evidence to back it up.
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