This year, the Pezcoller-AACR Award celebrated the authors of a true medical revolution: the possibility of preventing cancer before it even develops, instead of merely treating it once it is already present.
This extraordinary milestone is linked to the history of the vaccine against Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a very common virus responsible for nearly all cervical cancers as well as other forms of cancer affecting the throat and reproductive organs.
In the 1990s, American researchers Douglas Lowy and John Schiller found the key to defeating it: they succeeded in creating virus-like particles in the laboratory that perfectly mimic the outer shell of the virus but are completely empty inside, meaning they are free of viral DNA. This means they are entirely harmless and cannot cause the disease, yet they are capable of “tricking” our immune system, prompting it to produce powerful antibodies able to fend off the real virus in case of exposure. Thanks to this technology, the HPV vaccines widely used around the world today were born, and they are already showing exceptional results with a drastic drop in infections and precancerous lesions in countries with high vaccination rates.
