The Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine 2024 goes to German Dirk Görlich. British Charles Swanton will receive the translational medicine award, the foundation announced. The prizes are worth 500 thousand francs (around 529 thousand euros) each.
Görlich, director of the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Natural Sciences in Göttingen, Germany, has contributed significantly to our understanding of the processes by which certain molecules enter and leave the cell nucleus, according to the Geneva Foundation. This so-called nucleocytoplasmic transport plays a fundamental role in the body's cells and affects almost every aspect of health and disease, according to the Louis Jeantet Foundation.
Charles Swanton, from the Francis Crick Institute in London, will be honored for his discoveries in the genetics and evolution of cancer. He changed the way the world understands cancer, the foundation said. With his discoveries he understood how tumors develop, spread and gradually develop resistance to certain treatments. According to the foundation, it proved that the heterogeneity of tumors is the result of ramified evolution and is shaped by genome instability, the therapies used and the patient's immunity.
Annual awards ceremony
The Louis Jeantet Awards are awarded annually to outstanding researchers working in one of the member countries of the Council of Europe. This award is one of the best endowed in Europe. The two prizes awarded are each endowed with 500,000 francs, of which 450,000 are intended to finance research work.
Since the creation of the Louis Jeantet Awards in 1986, the prize has been awarded to 105 researchers, 17 of them from Switzerland. 30 from Great Britain, 22 from Germany, 15 from France, four from Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as two each from Belgium, Finland, Norway and Austria and one from Hungary. 15 of these laureates later received the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Chemistry.