Three life scientists from mainland China and France have won Hong Kong’s Shaw Prize for developing a therapy that has turned a rare form of leukaemia from deadly to widely curable.
Professor Emerita Anne Dejean, Professor Hugues de The and Professor Chen Zhu have won in equal shares the life sciences and medicine prize of the Shaw Prize, which has been dubbed the “Nobel Prize of the East”.
The three academics were recognised for their discovery of the molecular and cellular bases of acute promyelocytic leukaemia, a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer, as well as pioneering a synergistic targeted therapy that greatly reduced the mortality of the disease.
Dejean, of the Institut Pasteur in France, de The of the College de France and Chen of Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s school of medicine, were previously given the Sjoberg award from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work on acute promyelocytic leukaemia in 2018.
For the Sjoberg award, the three scientists were honoured for their targeted treatment using retinoic acid and arsenic, instead of traditional chemotherapy, to treat the rare form of leukaemia.
The scientists had mapped out the molecular mechanisms of the cancer, identified a specific genetic mutation and helped destroy a faulty protein in affected cells to stop a process that could result in death for three out of four patients.
With this treatment, the cancer cells disappear because they lose the ability to renew themselves.
Discoveries for this treatment have been made progressively since the 1980s.
The Shaw Prize was established by the late entertainment mogul Run Run Shaw and has been awarded annually to individuals since 2004 for their outstanding contributions in three categories: astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences.
Each prize consists of a medal, a certificate and a monetary award of US$1.2 million.
The winners of this year’s astronomy prize were Emeritus Professor and visiting senior scientist Ken’ichi Nomoto of the University of Tokyo and Professor Stanford Woosley of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Both physicists were awarded in equal share for their studies of stellar explosions and the origin of the elements.
The prize in mathematical sciences went in equal shares to Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University and Camillo De Lellis of the Institute for Advanced Study in the United States.
They were awarded for their breakthrough contributions to the use of techniques from mathematical analysis to applied problems in information theory, signal processing and statistics, and the study of singularities in geometric measure theory and fluid dynamics. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
