NIAID director wins Canada Gairdner Global Health Award

Abstract

Infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci has been awarded 2016's Global Health Award from the Gairdner Foundation for his decades of work against HIV/AIDS. Brian Owens reports. Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has won the 2016 Global Health Award from Canada's Gairdner Foundation for his work on HIV/AIDS. Fauci is “one of the towering figures in understanding the natural history of HIV”, John Dirks, president of the Gairdner Foundation, tells The Lancet. Fauci is being given the award for his important fundamental research on the virus, as well as his leadership of NIAID over the past three decades where he contributed to the development of new treatments, and worked on combating AIDS around the world, especially in Africa. “Without him, we would not have made the overwhelming progress that we have made”, says Dirks. Fauci was one of the first scientists to begin studying AIDS. He was studying how the immune system is regulated when the first American cases surfaced in 1981, and immediately changed the direction of his research to focus on the new disease. “I foresaw that even though we didn't know what the virus was, we were just seeing the tip of the iceberg”, says Fauci. “I had an ominous feeling it would explode into something huge for global health.” Fauci took on the role of Director of NIAID in 1984 largely so he could expand the institute's efforts on AIDS, at a time when the US Government was being criticised for ignoring the epidemic. But he maintained his own laboratory and remains active in research. One of his most important research contributions was the discovery that even when the disease seemed to be clinically latent, the virus was still active in the lymph nodes and continued to prey on the immune system. “That discovery helped develop the framework for how treatment must take place”, says Dirks. “That it must be vigorous and long term.” It was through his leadership of NIAID that many of today's drugs to treat HIV/AIDS were developed. He established the HIV/AIDS programme at the institute and led the largest research effort on the disease in the world, which succeeded in turning around the AIDS epidemic through the discovery of drugs and treatments that could suppress the virus to the point where people could live normal lives. “All of the clinical trials that were done in collaboration with industry have NIAID fingerprints on them”, says Fauci. The treatments that Fauci's NIAID helped develop have revolutionised the way that HIV/AIDS is dealt with over the past few decades. Dirks recalls working in Vancouver when the HIV epidemic was gripping the west coast in the 1980s and 1990s, with wards full of terminally ill patients with AIDS, whereas now very few people are admitted to hospital as inpatients, instead mostly attending clinics as chronic patients. “The whole clinical picture is different today”, says Dirks. “He turned AIDS, in most places, into a chronic disease.” But perhaps the part of his work that had the biggest impact on the world was his leadership of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), launched by President George W Bush in 2003. Fauci describes the programme, which focuses on preventing and treating HIV in southern Africa, as “probably the most important public health endeavour for a single disease in history”, and says it has been credited with saving more than 7 million lives. In addition, says Dirks, PEPFAR has provided mentorship and training to build scientific capacity in Africa in immunology and infectious diseases. Although Fauci has won many accolades for his work on HIV/AIDS, including a US Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Lasker Award, he says the Gairdner Award is particularly meaningful to him because of its global focus. “I have a passion for global health that has driven my research efforts”, Fauci says. “Infectious disease knows no boundaries.” “Even though he may work from a perch in the NIH in the US, there is a full global dimension to everything he has done”, agrees Dirks. HIV research is also the focus of another of the Gairdner Foundation's awards this year. The Canada Gairdner Wightman Award is being given to Frank Plummer, a microbiologist at the University of Manitoba and former scientific director of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, for his research on HIV transmission in Africa and his work at NML on influenza, Ebola, and severe acute respiratory syndrome. Dirks says the overlap between the two awards is just a coincidence, but there are parallels between the two winners. “Plummer's leadership at NML has been substantive, in that sense he is much like Fauci”, says Dirks. “They happen to be very complementary.” Anthony Fauci © 2016 Gairdner Foundation 2016 Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. Frank Plummer © 2016 Katia Pershin 2016 Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.