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Courtesy Caprisa

Last week, the 2024 Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award was granted to married duo Quarraisha Abdool Karim and Salim S. Abdool Karim.The South African-born researchers began their work while both were at Columbia University in New York during the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. That disease wasn’t the focus of their research at the time, but that changed quickly. “HIV absolutely dominated New York in 1988,” Salim told Forbes. And the two realized that the disease wasn’t going to stay there. “When we got back to South Africa, we committed ourselves to work on HIV,” he continued.

Back home, their research led them to realize that preventing the spread of HIV meant empowering women to protect themselves. So they began their research into a wide variety of different types of prophylactic treatments that might help. They spent the next 18 years “failing repeatedly,” Salim said, while also through the years working on advocacy and education about HIV/AIDS to bring help to those who needed it and to find other ways to prevent its spread.

In the early 2000’s, the pair turned their attention to tenofovir, a drug originally directed at herpes which was approved in 2001 by the FDA for treating HIV. The couple wanted to see if it might also be used to help prevent infection in the first place. After a years-long study, the couple presented the results that the drug could lower the risk of infection for women at an AIDS research conference in 2010.........

© Forbes