Nobel Prize "for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer".
Ever since microorganisms were known to cause disease, scientists have tried to know whether they cause clinically relevant human cancers. However, for more than half a century only a very specific group of viruses, retroviruses, were identified as the cause of very rare malignant tumors, normally not affecting humans, and it was even widely assumed that no really important cancer was caused by an infection.
Harald zur Hausen showed that a great majority of cervical cancers, the second most frequent cancer in women, had been infected by human papillomavirus (HPV). This went against the consensus of the time, when it was thought that if any virus was related to this particular disease, it would be herpes virus. It was also a challenging observation for the technology of the time, as cervical cancers no longer had an infective HPV when they were analyzed. They kept only the HPV DNA, and usually not even all the DNA.
zur Hausen’s discoveries have allowed to know how a non-retroviral virus can cause cancer, which has been instrumental in the understanding of non-viral oncogenic processes. Last, but not least, they resulted in the development of HPV vaccines that will prevent cervical cancers in future generations.
