Keerti Shah, a virologist whose research on the connections between human papillomavirus and cervical cancer in the 1990s led to the development of the HPV vaccine, died last month (July 21) at his home in Ponce Inlet, Florida. He was 90.
Shah spent almost all of his research career at Johns Hopkins University, joining the faculty of the university’s School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the Bloomberg School of Public Health) in 1962, and staying until his retirement in 2013. A 1999 paper he coauthored on the prevalence of HPV in cervical cancer, entitled “Human papillomavirus is a necessary cause of invasive cervical cancer worldwide,” has been cited nearly 10,000 times and represented a key step on the path to regulatory approval of a vaccine against the virus in 2006.
“The HPV vaccine provides 100 percent protection and is the only vaccine available for a major human cancer,” Johns ...
