Winners of 'Baby Nobels' announced

The 2009 winners of Canada's Gairdner Awards for medical research, also known as the "Baby Nobels," include a pioneering epidemiologist who guides doctors toward making better treatment decisions and a Japanese scientist who reprogrammed skin cells to become stem cells.

The awards, announced Tuesday, will be presented in Toronto in October. Over the past 50 years, one in four winners have gone on to become Nobel laureates.

One of this year's winners, Dr. David Sackett, a professor emeritus at McMaster University in Hamilton, who spoke at the announcement, sums up his strategy as "helping smart doctors stop prescribing dumb treatments."

Sackett is the founder of the first clinical epidemiology department in Canada and led the move toward "evidence-based medicine," which he said has three components:

1. Being a good doctor with clinical skills to diagnose patients well.
2. Using evidence generated from proper research, such as randomized clinical trials in which similar groups of patients either receive or don't receive a given intervention and are then carefully followed up to see whether they fare better.
3. Incorporating a patient's expectations and values of health care.

"I think the important thing to recognize is that these are very bright people," Sackett said of the doctors prescribing inadequate treatments while speaking with CBC Radio's Metro Morning.

"These are frequently the leaders of medicine, extremely intelligent, certainly smarter than I am, yet are using observation and personal experience to decide what works and what doesn't work."

Stem cell discovery

Sackett gave the example of heart attack patients with unstable rhythms who were often treated with specific drugs to bring the rhythm back to normal. But it wasn't until a randomized clinical trial was done that it was discovered that the drugs were actually lethal.

For other proposed treatments, such as surgical techniques, proponents are often now teaming up with methodology experts to test them, he said.

Another of this year's winners is Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan, who transformed skin cells from an 81-year-old into stem cells, which have the ability to become other types of cells.

Yamanaka tested the idea first in mice and then in human cells, using viruses to deliver genes that create what are called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. His discovery sidesteps the debate over using human embryos and removes the threat of immune rejection since the reprogramming offers personalized cells. 

This month, Andras Nagy of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital and his colleagues announced they had developed a way to transform skin cells into iPS cells while removing the genes that could cause cancer.

$100,000 prize

The other winners are:

Nubia Munoz, emeritus professor of the National Cancer Institute in Colombia, for work that led to developing vaccines to protect against cervical cancer.

Lucy Shapiro of Stanford University and Richard Losick of Harvard University for their basic research on how bacteria grow, divide or become dormant.

Kyoto University's Kazutoshi Mori and the University of California's Peter Walter for their work investigating how proteins are folded in cells.

The awards were founded in 1959 by Toronto businessman James Gairdner.

Last year, the federal government announced a $20-million endowment for the Gairdner Foundation, which increased the award to $100,000, up from $30,000 in previous years.

As part of the 50th Anniversary of the foundation, the group is planning to hold seven international symposiums in Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa, Toronto, Sherbrooke, Montreal and Halifax between March and November.

The final symposium will occur in Toronto Oct. 28-30, where 50 past Gairdner recipients, including 22 Nobel Laureates, will give lectures and participate in panels and other public events.