John Mekalanos, the Adele Lehman Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School, is among four inaugural winners of the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Award.
The major new award honors Mekalanos for his multiple discoveries on the complex and multifaceted mechanisms of cholera pathogenesis. The award carries a prize of €120,000 ($155,500). Mekalanos, the head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at HMS, delivered an award lecture Nov. 13 at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.
“This award recognizes the critical challenge posed by cholera and other neglected tropical diseases, as well as the potential of biomedical research to meet that challenge,” Mekalanos said. “It also recognizes the shared efforts of many brilliant researchers, both in my lab and among our distinguished collaborators.”
The award cited Mekalanos for “His groundbreaking work on virulence factors has broad implications in infection biology and has allowed important progress towards new vaccines and treatment options for cholera.”
Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Award Winners
In addition to Mekalanos, the other inaugural winners were:
- James Collins, a founding core faculty member of the Wyss Instute Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and a university professor at the Boston University, for his seminal discoveries of unsuspected mechanisms of action of antibiotics and the way they generate resistant strains of bacteria. “His work has important implications for avoiding resistance and pave the way to eradicate difficult-to-treat persistent bacteria,” the award committee said.
- Peter Palese of Mount Sinai Medical Center for his fundamental work on influenza genetics. “His pioneering development of reverse genetics for negative strand RNA viruses permitted studies of viral gene structure and function and greatly facilitated the development of commercial flu vaccines,” the award committee said.
- Jeffrey Ravetch of the Rockefeller University for discovering the mechanisms by which antibodies carry out their diverse biological functions. “His work has transformed our understanding of how these molecules of the immune system work and led to the improvement and the generation of therapeutic molecules,” the award committee said.
The winners were selected by a jury of seven prestigious members: Peter Agre of John Hopkins University, Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California San Francisco, Pascale Cossart of the Institut Pasteur, Alice Dautry of the Institut Pasteur, Depei Liu of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Robert Sebbag of Sanofi and Elias Zerhouni of Sanofi.
