She's Got Chutzpah

Kathrin Jansen, Ph.D. (right) and Laura Koutsky, Ph.D. (left): Despite massive skepticism, scientists create a vaccine for cervical cancer.

Dr. Kathrin Jansen is used to skepticism. When she began research in 1993 to create a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, she wasn't surprised that some of her colleagues raised their eyebrows.

Still, Jansen, executive director for microbial vaccine research at Merck Research Laboratories in West Point, Pennsylvania, felt she was onto something. A fellow researcher put her in touch with Dr. Laura Koutsky, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, and the two started working together. They knew that nearly all-cervical cancers are caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV). Jansen made a vaccine by introducing a viral gene into yeast, which produces a protein that stimulates the immune system to fight the virus. Then came the tough part—years of research despite limited resources and doubt from within the organization about Jansen and her colleagues' proposed methods of testing.

"The naysayers put up barriers, or tried to direct the team in what ultimately would have been the wrong direction," recalls Jansen. The detractors were silenced when the proof-of-concept clinical study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in late 2002. There are still questions to be answered about the vaccine (how long it's effective, for instance), but it's clear that it will affect women's health around the globe. "This outcome was the absolute high of my scientific career," says Jansen, who estimates that the vaccine could be available in 2006.