Congratulations to The Sjöberg Prize awardee

The Sjöberg Prize was established by the Sjöberg Foundation last year with a donation of about $223 million from the late Swedish businessman Bengt Sjöberg. Its inaugural prize was award to California based RSA Fellow, Tony Hunter.

We would like to offer our congratulations to Professor Tony Hunter FRSA, who holds an American Cancer Society Professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has been awarded $500,000 as part of the $1 million Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' inaugural Sjöberg Prize for Cancer Research for "ground-breaking studies of cellular processes that have led to the development of new and effective cancer drugs."

The prize ceremony, which is modelled after the Nobel Prize ceremony, will be held in Stockholm during the Academy's annual meeting on March 31, 2017, in the presence of His Majesty the King and Her Majesty the Queen of Sweden.

"It is a great honour to have been selected as an inaugural recipient of the Sjöberg Prize," says Hunter. "I have been fortunate to work in an inspiring and collaborative scientific community both at Salk and around the world, with excellent mentors, colleagues and students, all of whom contributed greatly to the breakthrough for which I am being honoured."

The annual prize, which includes $100,000 as a personal award with $900,000 U.S. dollars designated as a grant for future research, is shared equally by the awardees. Hunter shares the honour with immunologist James P. Allison of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose work on the white blood cells known as T cells led to the development of immune checkpoint therapy drugs that promote the immune response to cancer, and are now widely used in cancer therapy.