ABOVE: A nurse vaccinates a baby at the Ngbaka health center in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
GAVI, PHIL MOORE

The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation has awarded immunologist Jacques Miller of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and his collaborator Max Cooper of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, the $250,000 prize for basic medical research for their work identifying T and B cells in the middle of the 20th century. It was “a monumental achievement that provided the organizing principle of the adaptive immune system and launched the course of modern immunology,” according to the announcement.

The 2019 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award goes to H. Michael Shepard, formerly of Genentech, Dennis Slamon of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Axel Ullrich of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and formerly of Genentech for the development of a monoclonal...

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The Lasker Foundation also honors Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, with its Bloomberg Public Service Award for the Geneva-based non-governmental organization’s efforts to provide children in low- and middle-income countries with access to life-saving vaccines. The organization has helped vaccinate 760 million children in 73 countries, Nature reports. Each of these prizes also shares a $250,000 reward.

Jef Akst is the managing editor of The Scientist. Email her at jakst@the-scientist.com

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