Unter dem Namen Royal Society GlaxoSmithKline Prize and Lecture vergab die Royal Society eine Auszeichnung für herausragende Arbeiten der vorangegangenen zehn Jahre auf dem Gebiet der Medizin oder Zahnmedizin. Der Empfänger unterlag bezüglich seiner Nationalität keinen Einschränkungen. Der Preisträger war aufgerufen, vor der Royal Society eine Vorlesung zu halten.
Der Preis wurde ursprünglich von der Wellcome Foundation gestiftet, einem Pharmaunternehmen, das 1996 mit Glaxo zu Glaxo Wellcome verschmolz, das 2000 wiederum in GlaxoSmithKline aufging. GlaxoSmithKline sponserte seit 2002 die Auszeichnung, die aus einer Goldmedaille und einem Preisgeld von 2500 Pfund Sterling bestand. 2016 wurde die Vergabe eingestellt.
Preisträger Bearbeiten
- 1980: César Milstein In recognition of his pioneering the production of monoclonal antibodies from hybrid cell lines and initiating their application worldwide in many fields of biology and medicine.
- 1982: Hans Walter Kosterlitz In recognition of his studies of the action of opiates and the discovery of the enkephalins.
- 1984: Raymond Andrew, James M. S. Hutchison, John Mallard, Peter Mansfield In recognition of their development of NMR imaging as a diagnostic tool in medicine.
- 1986: Donald Metcalf, Leo Sachs In recognition of their discovery of factors which regulate growth and differentiation in normal and leukaemic blood-forming tissue.
- 1988: Louis M. Kunkel In recognition of his achievement in identifying by novel techniques of reverse genetics the biochemical abnormality responsible for Ducheme/Becker muscular dystrophy as being the absence of a previously unknown protein, dystrophin.
- 1990: Philippa Marrack, John W. Kappler In recognition of their seminal contributions to T-cell biology, which include the characterisation of the T-cell receptor; the demonstration that self-tolerance is caused by clonal elimination in the thymus; and the discovery that bacterial toxins act as 'superantigens'.
- 1992: Paul Nurse In recognition of his seminal contributions to the understanding of the molecular basis of regulation of the eukaryotic cycle.
- 1994: David J. P. Barker In recognition of his singularly novel and important contributions to our understanding of the causes of a number of the major diseases of later life (cardiovascular disease, obstructive airways disease and diabetes) by demonstrating that their origins may lie in fetal nutrition and in growth in utero and during infancy.
- 1996: Charles Weissmann In recognition of his work on prion diseases which lead to the remarkable advances in understanding the molecular biology of spongiform encephalopathies.
- 1998: Gillian Bates, Stephen W. Davies In recognition of their discovery of the cause of Huntington's Disease, a dominantly inherited, late onset, fatal neurodegenerative disease.
- 2000: David H. MacLennan In recognition of his work on calcium regulatory proteins, particularly in the understanding of malignant hyperthermia (MH), central core disease (CCD), Brody disease and phospholamban, and applying his knowledge of the gene in MH to develop accurate diagnosis of disease in pigs. In addition to its valuable veterinary application, this work represents a particularly good example of the way in which basic science has been developed to the point at which it is widely applied.
- 2003: Michael Neuberger In recognition of his work on resolving the molecular mechanism of somatic antibody diversification, a key feature of immune response, with consequences reaching far beyond immunology to DNA instability and cancer.
- 2005: Nicholas White For his outstanding work on the treatment and prevention of serious diseases within the developing world.
- 2007: Mark Pepys For his excellent work as a clinical scientist who has identified specific proteins as new therapeutic targets and developed novel drugs with potential use in amyloidosis, Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disease.
- 2010: Stephen West In recognition of his pioneering work on the molecular mechanisms of genetic recombination and DNA repair and their relation to tumorigenesis.
- 2012: Adrian Bird For his outstanding contributions in the field of epigenetics, especially DNA methylation and its role in development and disease.
- 2014: Nicholas Lydon For the development of the drug imatinib, a targeted tyrosine kinase inhibitor that has transformed the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukaemia (CML) and is a paradigm for cancer drug discovery.
- 2016: Andrew Hattersley For his work on genetic and physiological studies of patients with common subtypes of monogenic diabetes revolutionising treatment for these patients.