Jian Zhou

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.

Zhou was born in 1957 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.

He was admitted to Wenzhou Medical College in 1977 and graduated 1982.

His wife Xiao-Yi Sun (孙小依) was his classmate at the college.

He subsequently earned a master's degree from Zhejiang Medical University, where he pursued his research interest in HPV.

He then earned his M.D. at Henan Medical University (now medical school of Zhengzhou University) and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Beijing Medical University, before moving to the University of Cambridge in 1988 to continue his research in cancer and virus.

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.

In March 1999, Zhou died of hepatitis, a disease he had contracted as a young man in China.

He was survived by his wife Xiao-Yi Sun and son Andreas Zhou.

Estimates of the contemporary global mortality rate have remained in the 190,000 to 300,000 range from 2000 to 2010.

(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.

The 2007 WHO progress report says that preventable cervical cancer "was responsible in 2005 for up to 500,000 new cases, and up to 257,000 deaths, more than 90% in low- and middle-income countries", but, "According to WHO’s projections, deaths from cervical cancer will rise to 320,000 in 2015 and to 435,000 in 2030" (p.4).

These projections may be little effected by vaccination programs (anyway unlikely on cost grounds) because "A reduction in cancer incidence and mortality might not be measurable before 10 to 30 years after the vaccine is introduced." (p.5).

Other estimates of the problem's scale are broadly in agreement:

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.