Harald zur Hausen, 87, found virus link to cervical cancer

Harald zur Hausen, a German virologist awarded a Nobel Prize for groundbreaking work that found links between a common wart-causing virus and cervical cancer, leading to a vaccine that is considered highly effective but remains in relatively limited use worldwide, died May 29 at 87.

The German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, where zur Hausen had served as scientific director until 2003, announced the death but gave no further details.

The research led by zur Hausen into the human papillomavirus, or HPV, turned a theory that was once on the fringes of scientific acceptance into new fields of ontological study and potentially spared tens of thousands of people from getting cancer.

His findings also offered insights into the role of HPV in a range of sexually transmitted cancers in women and men — accounting for about 5 percent of all cancer cases worldwide.

zur Hausen faced a wall of skepticism at the beginning. He “went against the current dogma,” said the 2008 announcement of the Nobel Prize in medicine, which zur Hausen shared with two French researchers for their work in identifying HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

As zur Hausen began his research in the 1970s, most cancer specialists believed cervical cancer was mostly triggered by factors such as hormones or heredity. Pap smears had made early detection possible and mortality rates were falling.

zur Hausen’s idea was built on how other viruses, such as Epstein-Barr, can increase the risk of cancers in lymph nodes and elsewhere. There was anecdotal evidence to give zur Hausen a start. Many women diagnosed with cervical cancer also had genital warts caused by HPV. Yet establishing a connection took years of painstaking detective work in the lab.

The first problem was that there was no method at the time to grow HPV in tissue cultures. “It’s like starting a car to see how fast it will go. If you can’t get the motor started, you don’t know,” Wayne Lancaster, a microbiologist at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post in 1985.

In addition, finding research funding was difficult. The few researchers who supported zur Hausen thought he was looking in the wrong direction. Most believed a herpes virus, HSV-2, could be a link to cervical cancer.

Step after step, zur Hausen built his evidence. He and his team hunted for genetic markers of HPV in cancer cells. A hospital donated biopsy samples for their first tests.

By 1984, he had published two studies confirming strains of HPV in cervical cancer clusters — showing a pathway for most cervical cancer cases. zur Hausen’s work also helped launch studies that found HPV links to other cancers in male and female genitalia or passed to other parts of the body through sexual contact.

“I’m not sure vindicated is the right word because English is not my first language,” he told the Globe and Mail in Toronto in 2008. “But I feel that we did indeed follow the right path despite what others were saying.”

Two years earlier, in 2006, the Food and Drug Administration had approved the first HPV vaccine, which was recommended for young girls as well as boys. More than 75 percent of U.S. boys and girls under 17 have at least one dose of the HPV vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.