Married HIV researchers win the esteemed Lasker Award [VIDEOS]

The 2024 Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award, known to many as “America’s Nobel Prize,” went to HIV researchers Salim Abdool Karim, PhD, and Quarraisha Abdool Karim, PhD. The couple are professors at Columbia University and are public health advocates. The prize is worth $250,000.

The epidemiologists were honored “for elucidating the main causes of heterosexual HIV transmission; Introducing life-saving approaches to preventing and treating HIV; and statecraft in public health policy and advocacy,” according to the Lasker Foundation.

The Abdool Karims are also senior scientific researchers at CAPRISA, the Center for the AIDS Research Program in South Africa, where they grew up under apartheid before moving to the United States.

The pair’s research led to the discovery that teenage girls in Africa were becoming infected with HIV not from other teenagers, but from men more than ten years older. In 2010, they showed that a tenofovir gel could protect women from HIV, which contributed to the use of antiretroviral drugs as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention today.

“The problem was that the gel was more expensive to produce and didn’t provide the same protection as the tenofovir tablets,” Salim Abdool Karims told NPR, which interviewed the couple after they received the Lasker Award. “It turned out that taking tenofovir tablets was just as good and sometimes even better than the gel and cheaper, and this ultimately led to the World Health Organization recommendation in 2015 that tenofovir-containing pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) be offered to all people. “A high risk of infection.”

The Lasker Foundation was founded in 1945 by Albert and Mary Laster, who were committed to biomedical research. It supports scientific research through public education and advocacy, as well as through its prestigious Lasker Prizes. According to a press release from the Lasker Foundation, this year’s winners were announced on September 15th and honored at a gala celebration on September 27th in New York City.

Two additional Lasker Awards were announced:

The Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award 2024

Zhijian “James” Chen (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center)

For the discovery of the cGAS enzyme, which recognizes foreign and self-DNA and solves the mystery of how DNA stimulates immune and inflammatory responses.

The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award 2024

Joel Habener (Massachusetts General Hospital)

Lotte Bjerre Knudsen (Novo Nordisk)

Svetlana Mojsov (Rockefeller University)

For the discovery and development of GLP-1-based drugs that have revolutionized the treatment of obesity.

You can watch Abdool Karims’ speech in the video at the top of this article and on Vimeo.

During the Lasker Foundation Award ceremony, Margaret Hamburg, MD, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, introduced the Abdool Karims. You can watch the video directly above or on Vimeo. She said in part:

“Her contributions to HIV prevention can be traced in many ways to Quarraisha’s work in the early 1990s, when she led South Africa’s first efforts to understand the spread of HIV in the community. It was a time when HIV prevalence in South Africa was still relatively low. She and her team found that infections were increasing rapidly among teenage girls. Her interest in developing new ways to prevent infections in women led to her groundbreaking collaboration with Salim.

“In 2010, they reported evidence from a CAPRISA clinical trial showing that a vaginal gel containing the antiretroviral drug tenofovir could prevent sexually acquired HIV. The study spurred one of the biggest breakthroughs of the HIV pandemic: the development of antiretroviral drugs as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PreP). The couple is currently working on a long-term version of PrEP. They are also leading the development of an HIV monoclonal antibody. They want to see if it offers another way to provide lasting protection while supporting efforts to develop an HIV vaccine.

“Their groundbreaking work in the fight against HIV includes major advances against one of the leading causes of death in HIV patients – coinfections with tuberculosis [tuberculosis]. They led a study that showed that combining antiretroviral treatments with tuberculosis treatments significantly improved survival. This has now become the standard of care worldwide. In Africa it is said to be able to prevent more than one hundred thousand deaths every year.

“Few who knew of their work were surprised that the Abdool Karims immediately took center stage when the world faced a new pandemic: COVID-19. They were highly visible in the mainstream media in South Africa and across the region. They were effective communicators and pushed back against COVID falsehoods, just as they had done earlier in their HIV-infected careers. In 2020, the John Maddox Prize for Advancing Sound Science was split between two people: Anthony Fauci and Salim Abdool Karim.

“The Abdool Karims also published studies examining how the new COVID virus affected HIV and tuberculosis patients. And their interest in COVID-19 variants provided the first evidence of the dangers posed by the Omicron variant.

“The couple also leaves a lasting legacy of research capacity and talent. Twenty years ago they led the founding of CAPRISA. It is now widely recognized as a global center for innovation and discovery of HIV and other infectious diseases. They also founded the South African HIV Prevention and Vaccine Research Unit and Salim set up a biotech research center and a tuberculosis research institute in South Africa. Over time, the couple has trained over 600 African infectious disease scientists. And they were role models and inspiration for countless others.”

During the NPR interview, the Abdool Karims were asked what they plan to do with the prize money and what lies ahead. “The prize money will be used for research and/or training of the students,” Salim replied. “We are currently working on an annual long-term prevention technology so that women only need it once a year. (This could take the form of a matchstick-sized implant that contains enough tenofovir to release slowly over an entire year, so young girls don’t have to worry about prophylaxis.)”

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