Gates, Aust scientist win Lasker prizes

An Australian researcher is among several scientists and philanthropists, including Bill and Melinda Gates, who have won prestigious Lasker Awards for medical research and contributions to public health.

The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced the recipients of the $US250,000 ($A273,269) prizes on Monday. The awards will be presented on September 20 in New York City.

The Lasker clinical medical research award will be shared by Graeme Clark, an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Ingeborg Hochmair of the company MED-EL in Innsbruck, Austria, and Blake Wilson of Duke University in North Carolina, for developing the modern cochlear implant. More than 320,000 people around the world use the implants for severe hearing loss, the foundation said.

The Gateses won the public service award "for leading a historic transformation in the way we view the globe's most pressing health concerns and improving the lives of millions of the world's most vulnerable," the Lasker foundation said.

They have donated more than $US26 billion to their philanthropic foundation. They often team up with agencies that can provide diverse expertise, the Lasker foundation said, noting that they supported an international partnership that has helped immunise hundreds of millions of children against killer diseases. Their current priorities include polio, agriculture and family-planning information and services.

The Lasker award for basic medical research will be shared by Richard Scheller of the biotech company Genentech and Dr Thomas Sudhof of Stanford University. With research they began independently in the late 1980s, they unravelled details of how brain cells release chemical messengers to communicate with each other. Scientists are beginning to find connections between the molecular equipment they studied and serious illnesses like Parkinson's disease, the foundation said.