Two Oxford professors win international medical award

Professors Peter Ratcliffe and Nick White of Oxford University have been named winners of Canada Gairdner Awards for 2010, one of the most prestigious prizes for medical research. The $100,000 awards have a track record of identifying significant and groundbreaking work early on. Since the Canada Gairdner Awards were created in 1959, there have been 298 awardees. Of these, 76 have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Professor Nick White, who is director of the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok, is to receive the 2010 Canada Gairdner Global Health Award - the first major international award that recognizes individual contributions to health in the developing world. Professor White proved that artemisinin, a compound derived from a plant used for over a thousand years in Chinese medicine, is a highly effective treatment for malaria. Artemisinin represents the single most effective and fastest-acting treatment for malaria that we have.