Litnet

Van die menigte Afrikaners wat dit land vir beter geleenthede in die buiteland verlaat het, het hul stempel op die mensdom agtergelaat. Onder hulle is Dr Elna van der Ryst.

Dr Elna van der Ryst, meanwhile, was early in her career as a medical doctor in South Africa when the AIDS epidemic hit her native land with full force. “Every single South African has been touched by HIV, and even as a young doctor I lost friends and patients to the disease. Seeing patients die early in the epidemic shaped my career. For me, it was personal.”

Convinced there must be better options for treating the disease, she completed a postgraduate degree in virology and started to do research on HIV. After earning various degrees, including a Ph.D. with studies on HIV vaccines, she joined Drs. Wood and Perros at the Pfizer lab in 1999. http://www.innovation.org/index.cfm/StoriesofInnovation/InnovatorStories/The_Story_of_Selzentry

SELZENTRY was the first new oral medication for HIV in 10 years when it was approved in 2007 for CCR5-tropic patients already taking antiretroviral treatment. In November 2009, the Food and Drug Administration also approved it for newly infected patients who are CCR5-tropic. More than half of the more than one million Americans infected with HIV are CCR5-tropic and thus potential candidates to benefit from SELZENTRY.

Drs Wood, van der Ryst and Perros accepted the award at a luncheon at PhRMA's annual meeting today in Arlington, Va. Awards were presented by PhRMA President and CEO Billy Tauzin and by two-time Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis.

Louganis said that when he was first diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1988, the disease was considered by many a death sentence. He was prepared to go home, lock the door and wait to die. Instead, his life was saved through new medicines. Most recently, he began taking SELZENTRY and today was looking forward to thanking the scientists for their work.

"I feel incredibly privileged to be part of the team that was in the right place at the right time to convert science into something of value to mankind," Dr. Wood said in an interview prior to the award. "We not only found a medicine, but firsts in many ways in terms of science."

Dr van der Ryst, who began researching HIV after the deaths of both friends and patients in her native South Africa, said her years working on SELZENTRY were the most exciting of her life. Dr Perros added, "It doesn't take tens of thousands or millions of patients to make the work feel worthwhile. To sit with one person who survived and is healthy because of medicine you worked on is a tremendous feeling of satisfaction."

PhRMA's Discoverers Award recognizes scientists whose work has greatly benefited mankind.
http://www.natap.org/2010/newsUpdates/032010_01.htm

Jaco Fourie