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Jian Zhou (1957– March 1999) was a Chinese virologist and cancer researcher, who with fellow researcher Ian Frazer, invented Gardasil and Cervarix, the vaccines for stimulating human immunological resistance to the cervical cancer-inducing human papilloma virus.
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Biography
Jian Zhou received his medical degree from South China’s Wenzhou Medical College near Shanghai. Jian Zhou is survived by wife Xiao-Yi Sun and son Andreas Zhou.
HPV and Papilloma vaccine
Zhou met future research partner Ian Frazer at the University of Cambridge in 1989, bonded by a mutual respect and willingness to push the limits of their research. The two considered the problem of developing a vaccine for HPV – a virus that cannot be cultured without living tissue.
Frazer convinced Zhou to join him at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, and in 1990 they began to use molecular biology to synthesize particles in vitro that could mimic the virus. In March 1991 Zhou's wife and fellow researcher, Xiao-Yi Sun, assembled by Zhou's instructions two proteins into a virus-like particle (VLP), resembling the HPV shell, from which HPV vaccine would ultimately be made.
The vaccine completely protects unexposed women against four HPV strains responsible for 70% of cervical cancers, which kill about 250,000 women annually.
Frazer and Zhou filed a provisional patent in June 1991 and began work on developing the vaccine within UQ. To finance clinical trials, Australian medical company CSL, and later Merck, were sold partial patents. (CSL has the exclusive license to sell Gardasil in New Zealand and Australia, Merck the license elsewhere.) GlaxoSmithKline independently used the same VLP-approach to develop Cervarix, under a later US patent, licensing Frazer's intellectual property in 2005.
Death
In March 1999, Zhou died due to hepatitis, a disease he had contracted as a young man in native South East China. In 2008, Zhou's contribution to his efforts in research, including his work with the Gardasil vaccine, were formally recognised with a commemorative service attended by over 300 people, and included a written tribute from the Australian Prime Minister of the time, Kevin Rudd in Brisbane, Australia.