2 Australians Win Nobel Prize in Medicine, for Research on Peptic Ulcers

By LILA GUTERMAN

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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been won by two Australian scientists who discovered that peptic ulcers are caused by a bacterium, Sweden's Karolinska Institute announced this morning.

Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren will equally share the prize, which brings an award of approximately $1.3-million, when the Karolinska Institute presents it in December.

Before Dr. Marshall and Dr. Warren discovered the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, in the early 1980s, few scientists believed anything could survive in the highly acidic environment of the stomach. Most doctors believed ulcers were caused by stress or diet.

The Karolinska Institute calls the Australian discovery "remarkable and unexpected" and notes that as a result, peptic-ulcer disease, once a chronic condition, can be cured with a short course of antibiotics and acid inhibitors.

Dr. Warren, now 68 and retired from the Royal Perth Hospital, noticed that a spiral-shaped bacterium grew in the stomachs of about half the patients whose biopsies he studied and that tissues nearby were inflamed. He and Dr. Marshall, now 54 and a senior principal research fellow at the University of Western Australia, then studied biopsies from 100 patients and Dr. Marshall succeeded in growing the newfound bacteria, later called H. pylori, in the lab.

Together the two showed that the microbe was present in almost all patients with stomach inflammation or peptic-ulcer disease. They and others later demonstrated that the disease could be cured by antibiotics. Dr. Marshall even drank a sample of the bacterium, developed stomach inflammation, and treated himself with antibiotics.

The bacterium lives in the stomach of about half of all people worldwide, but most people experience no symptoms. Ten to 15 percent of people infected eventually develop peptic-ulcer disease. Infection with the bacterium also puts people at higher risk of stomach cancer, the world's No. 2 cause of cancer deaths.

The discovery that one of the most common diseases is caused by a microbe has also led researchers to look for microbial causes for other inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis.

More information about the prize winner is available on the Nobel Web site.

• Genetic Sequence Deciphered for Ulcer-Causing Bacterium (8/15/1997)