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We are barely into the post-summer conference and awards season and the Lasker Awards have landed! The awards recognise basic medical research, and clinical medical research respectively, acknowledging a maximum of three recipients.

The 2016 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award went to William G. Kaelin, Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza for the discovery of the pathway by which cells from humans and most animals sense and adapt to changes in oxygen availability.

The 2016 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award recognises Ralf F.W. Bartenschlager, Charles M. Rice and Michael J. Sofia for the development of a system to study the replication of the virus that causes hepatitis C and for the use of this system to revolutionise the treatment of this disease.

There is also a Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science, which this year acknowledges Bruce Alberts for his discoveries in DNA replication, and leadership in science and education.

We are proud to say that several of this year’s awardees are part of the F1000 Faculty and want to extend our congratulations to all the winners!

Bruce Alberts is an F1000 International Advisory Board member and has participated in the development of F1000Prime since 2001. He is also an advisor for our new-ish Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness Channel at F1000Research. Alberts was Editor-in-Chief at Science from 2009 – 2013 and is currently the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. He has also served two terms as the president of the National Academy of Sciences.

Two of our active Faculty Members, Ralf Bartenschlager, from the Faculty of Infectious  Diseases and Charles M. Rice, Section Head for Microbiology, share the Clinical Medicine Research Award with Michael J Sofia.

Ralf Bartenschlager is Professor and Head of the Department of Molecular Virology, University of Heidelberg. His work focuses on the molecular virology of the Hepatitis C virus (HCV), in particular developing cell culture models to study its replication cycle. He is also investigating immune responses induced by infections and viral countermeasures.

Charles M. Rice is the Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Chair in Virology and serves as Head of the Laboratory of Virology and Infectious Disease at Rockefeller University. His group works on understanding HCV and the structure of its encoded proteins. The team laboratory has recently established efficient cell culture systems for studying the virus’ replication and testing antiviral efficacy.

Former Faculty Members for Cell Biology, William Kaelin and Sir Peter Ratcliffe share the Basic Medical Research Award with Gregg L Semenza.

William Kaelin studies the functions of tumor suppressor proteins. He is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His laboratory uses a variety of approaches to understand how some proteins prevent tumor growth with the hope of developing drugs that would kill cells that lack a particular suppressor or protein.

Sir Peter Ratcliffe is Director of the Target Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford and Director at The Francis Crick Institute. His laboratory is focused on the mechanisms by which cells recognise low oxygen levels. These can be a component of many human diseases including cancer, heart disease, stroke, vascular disease, and anaemia. They have defined the oxygen sensing and signalling pathways that link the essential transcription factor, hypoxia inducible factor, to the availability of oxygen.