A member of this Foundation’s Medical Research Advisory Committee, Professor Ian Frazer has been awarded the prestigious Florey Medal for Medical Research honouring his work in discovering the HPV vaccine to eradicate cervical cancer.
The prestigious Florey award is named in honour of Australia’s first Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Howard Florey, who invented penicillin.
Professor Frazer, last year’s Australian of the Year, said he was honoured to receive the award on behalf of the team of people involved in developing human papillomavirus (HPV) cervical cancer vaccines, especially his UQ colleague, the late Dr Jian Zhou.
His discovery, a result of 20 years of research, has the potential to eradicate a cancer that annually kills close to 300,000 women worldwide.
Professor Frazer was assisted in his quest to develop the vaccine by a $1million ACRF grant in 1999 to the University of Queensland’s Centre for Immunology and Cancer Research, where he was the founding Director.
In 2006 Professor Frazer was appointed to the ACRF’s Medical Research Advisory Committee, joining eight other renowned Australian scientists, collectively charged with considering the Foundation’s research applications.
The Board of Trustees, management, staff and ACRF’s donors and supporters have been inspired by Professor Frazer’s work and congratulate him and his team at UQ.
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