Experts said the discovery of the Helicobacter pylori bacterium by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren in 1982 was met with scepticism by the medical community, which did not think bacteria could survive in the acid conditions of the stomach.
Marshall resorted to drinking a culture of the bacteria to give himself an ulcer and then to treat himself.
The findings eventually forced drug firms to rethink treatment of a condition that affects millions of people in a market worth billions of dollars.
“Thanks to the pioneering discovery by Marshall and Warren, peptic ulcer disease is no longer a chronic, frequently disabling condition, but a disease that can be cured by a short regimen of antibiotics and acid secretion inhibitors,” said the Nobel Assembly of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute.
Warren, 68, and Marshall, 54, share the 10 million crowns ($1.29 million) prize.
Warren said he and Marshall were sitting in a restaurant in Perth, Western Australia, when he got the call from Stockholm telling him they had won the prize.
“I was shocked,” Warren was quoted by Swedish news agency TT as saying. “When they first rang, I did not believe that it was true, that it really was the Nobel committee.”
Lord May of Oxford, president of Britain’s Royal Society of leading scientists, said Marshall’s “extraordinary act” of becoming his own guinea pig showed outstanding dedication.
With some scientists calling their findings “preposterous”, Marshall drank a broth of bacteria to show that the presence of H pylori in people with ulcers was no coincidence.
“I planned to give myself an ulcer, then treat myself, to prove that H. pylori can be a pathogen in normal people,” he told a scientific review.
‘TEMPORARY INFECTION’: “I thought about it for a few weeks, then decided to just do it. Luckily, I only developed a temporary infection.”
Suffering stomach pain, nausea and vomiting, he underwent an endoscopy which showed the distinctive spiral-shaped E pylori crowding around the inflammation in his stomach. His wife urged him to think of his children and get treatment — which he did.
Warren never believed he would win the prize.
“I thought it was a new and exciting discovery, but I did not believe that it was the type of discovery that one got the Nobel prize for,” he was quoted by TT as saying.
Professor Brian Spratt, a molecular microbiologist at Imperial College London, said the two had “a hell of a job” convincing people about their research.
“Drug companies had to radically change their approach from containing ulcers with antacids to treating with antibiotics. Ulcers predispose people to gastric cancer — so antibiotics also prevent cancer,” he added.
Australians have been on Nobel Medicine prize-winning teams previously — Sir Howard Florey in 1945, Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet in 1960, Sir John Eccles in 1963 and Peter Doherty in 1996. But this is the first time an all-Australian team has won.
Warren and Marshall were working at the Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia when they made the H pylori discovery.
Due to their work ulcers are commonly treated with a course of antibiotics, plus drugs to control the production of acid in the stomach or heal any damage done by the ulcer.
The market for stomach treatments is worth $20 billion a year, said a spokesman for Anglo-Swedish group AstraZeneca, which competes with US Abbott Laboratories and Japan’s Takeda. —Reuters