NORFOLK—A study championed by EVMS researcher David O.  Matson, M.D., Ph.D., on an intestinal virus that kills 500,000 children each year won recognition from Lancet as the year’s best medical research paper.

Published last January in the New England Journal of Medicine, Matson’s research helped speed approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of the Merck vaccine RotaTeq, which is now on all U.S. immunization schedules and has been provided to 2.5 million children in the U.S.

The editors chose two papers for the top honor — both on successful clinical trials for competing rotavirus vaccines — out of about 700,000 published by biomedical researchers in 2006.

The rotavirus vaccines “one day are likely to stand alongside smallpox, measles, and poliomyelitis vaccines in their global public health benefit,” wrote James Butcher, Lancet’s executive editor in an accompanying editorial.

Matson, principal U.S. investigator for the massive study, said he had no inkling that Lancet would cite his paper.

“It certainly is a pleasant feeling to get recognition for many years of quiet labor,” said Matson.

Rotavirus photo courtesy Wikimedia.

The second study recognized by Lancet was spearheaded by a Matson protégé, Chilean researcher Miguel O’Ryan, M.D., who worked with Matson over the decades and who has conducted research at the EVMS Center for Pediatric Research.

In giving the award, Lancet also noted that rotavirus research suffered an almost fatal setback when an earlier vaccine was withdrawn because it caused a rare bowel obstruction. That failure not only required a huge gamble by a pharmaceutical company, it required researchers to conduct the largest pre-licensure clinical trials since the development of the polio vaccine in the 1950s to prove that the new vaccines wouldn’t cause the rare complication.

Each study required the enrollment of nearly 70,000 children and infants around the world. Matson’s study had 400 sites in 11 nations. While Matson doesn’t know the precise figures, he estimated that the study costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

Much of the credit goes to those “willing to undertake studies of this magnitude to overcoming the failure of the previous vaccine.”

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