UZH awards Gretener-Thürlemann Prize to Arlene Sharpe and Gordon Freeman

(CONNECT) Arlene Sharpe and Gordon Freeman are the first researchers to be awarded the Gretener-Thürlemann Prize by the University of Zurich (UZH). This, UZH's biggest prize, is endowed with 500,000 Swiss francs. It is awarded on behalf of the Gretener-Thürlemann Foundation to scientists from all over the world for outstanding achievements in medicine, chemistry and physics. According to a UZH report, Sharpe and Freeman accepted the award on December 3 at the Baur au Lac Hotel in Zurich.

Arlene Sharpe and Gordon Freeman, who both completed their doctorates between 1979 and 1982, met in a German course at the beginning of their studies at Harvard University. They became a couple in their private lives and also went down the same academic path. Their common interest was and is research into the human immune system, as a detailed portrait of their home university shows. To this day, the Boston research teams of the two are cooperating to further decode the immune system.

Starting in the 1990s, they discovered important signaling pathways that inhibit the immune response against tumors. Around the year 2000, it became apparent that her new knowledge could also be used therapeutically. It is thanks to them that checkpoint inhibitors are now used in oncology for more than 25 types of cancer.

"We didn't know at the beginning where our research would take us," Sharpe is quoted as saying. "Today we can see that basic research is leading to therapies that we would never have dreamed of. This is very motivating for young researchers." Now, according to Freeman, the aim is to use new technologies to decode the signaling pathways of the immune system even further and to discover other genes and molecules involved. ce/mm