Ian Frazer


Ian Hector Frazer is a Scottish-born Australian immunologist, the founding CEO and Director of Research of the Translational Research Institute. Frazer and Jian Zhou developed and patented the basic technology behind the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer at the University of Queensland. The vaccine, now marketed as Gardasil and Cervarix, was the second cancer preventing vaccine, and the first vaccine designed to prevent a cancer. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute, Georgetown University, and University of Rochester also contributed to the further development of the cervical cancer vaccine in parallel.

Education

Frazer was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His parents were medical scientists, and he was drawn to science from a young age.
Frazer attended Aberdeen private school Robert Gordon's College. He chose to pursue medicine over an earlier interest in physics due to physics having fewer research opportunities, and he received his Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, at the University of Edinburgh in 1974 and 1977 respectively. It was during this time that he met his wife Caroline, whom he married in 1976. His 1978–79 residency was in the Edinburgh Eastern General Hospital, the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Roodlands General Hospital in Haddington.
In 1980/81 Frazer emigrated to Melbourne after he was headhunted by Dr. Ian Mackay at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research to research viral immunology. In 1981 he discovered that the immunodeficiency afflicting homosexuals in San Francisco was also found in the gay men in his hepatitis B study, and in 1984 helped to confirm that HIV was a cause. It was also found that another sexually transmitted virus was having a surprising effect: the human papilloma virus infection seemed to be inducing precancerous cells.
In 1985 he moved to the University of Queensland as a Senior Lecturer, with the opportunity to establish his own research laboratory. It was here in the Lions Human Immunology Laboratories he continued to research HPV in men, and contributed to HIV research. During this time Frazer also taught at the university and ran diagnostic tests for the Princess Alexandra Hospital and received his Doctor of Medicine qualification in 1988.

Breakthrough

On a 1989 sabbatical he met virologist Jian Zhou, and 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, 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, resembling the HPV shell, from which HPV vaccine would ultimately be made. 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. GlaxoSmithKline independently used the same VLP-approach to develop Cervarix, under a later US patent, licensing Frazer's intellectual property in 2005.
Later in 1991 the research was presented at a US scientific meeting, and Frazer became Director of the Centre for Immunology and Cancer Research at the University of Queensland. After three years in design, Gardasil went into testing, and Frazer became a Professor in the University's Department of Medicine. In 1998 Frazer completed the first human trials for Gardasil, and became an Australian citizen.

Pioneer Patent for VLPs and the HPV vaccine

US. 7,476,389, titled "Papilloma Virus Vaccines", was granted to co-inventors Ian Frazer and Jian Zhou on 13 January 2009. Its U.S. application was filed on 19 January 1994, but claimed priority under a 20 July 1992 PCT filing to the date of an initial Australian patent application filed on 19 July 1991.

Celebrity

In 2006 results from the four-year Phase III trials led to Australian and US regulatory approval. Frazer's studies showed 100% efficacious protective immunity in HPV naïve women, but could not directly test protective immunity in adolescent girls. As a surrogate test, antibody titer levels in vaccinated 9 to 15-year-old girls was shown high enough to give them the same level of immunity as vaccinated women. It has been suggested that one way to bring cheaper equivalent vaccines to market is to mandate a similar induced immune response.
Frazer administered the first official HPV-vaccination, and was made 2006 Queenslander of the Year and Australian of the Year.
In the 2007 resolution of their US patent lawsuit, Frazer's and Jian Zhou's heirs world-wide rights to the fundamental VLP science, and Frazer's and Zhou's priority to invention of that fundamental VLP science, were both established.
After 2009 reports of adverse Gardasil reactions, Frazer said "Apart from a very, very rare instance where you get an allergic reaction from the vaccine, which is about one in a million, there is nothing else that can be directly attributable to the vaccine." Ian Frazer is one of the "most trusted" Australians, and some critics have accused Gardasil's advocates of exploiting patriotism to promote its rapid Australian release.

Personal

Ian Frazer lives in Brisbane, Australia with his wife Caroline. As of 2010, two of his sons are medical students and the third is a veterinary scientist.

Awards and honours

In 1999 Frazer received the Australian Biotechnology Award, and has since received more than twenty awards for science:
In 2012 Frazer was named as a National Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia.
On 11 June 2012, Frazer was named a Companion of the Order of Australia for "eminent service to medical research, particularly through leadership roles in the discovery of the Human Papilloma Virus vaccine and its role in preventing cervical cancer, to higher education and as a supporter of charitable organisations."

Current work

Herpes

In February 2014, it was announced that Frazer's new vaccine against genital herpes has passed human safety trials in a trial of 20 Australians. The vaccine is designed to prevent new infections.

Research

From February 2011 to February 2015, Frazer was the CEO and Director of Research at the Translational Research Institute, a joint initiative of The University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, the Mater Medical Research Institute and the Princess Alexandra Hospital. He is researching immunoregulation and immunotherapeutic vaccines, supported by several US and Australian research funding bodies. He is working on a VLP-based vaccine against hepatitis C, and is researching extensions to the VLP production technology for dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis vaccines. Frazer expects HIV vaccines to be available by 2028. He is already overseeing trials of the first vaccine for skin cancer which might be ready before 2020.
Frazer is the inaugural holder of the Queensland Government Smart State premier's fellowship, worth $2.5 million over 5 years. He has held continuous research funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council since 1985, mostly relating to papilloma viruses or tumor immunology. He is currently a joint Chief Investigator on an NHMRC program grant and a NHMRC/Wellcome program grant, together worth more than $2 million a year.

Teaching and industry

He teaches immunology to undergraduates and graduate students at the University of Queensland, is Cancer Council Australia president, Chairman of the ACRF's Medical Research Advisory Committee, and advises the WHO and the Gates Foundation on papillomavirus vaccines.
Frazer consults for many pharmaceutical companies on Immunomodulatory drugs, prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines. He sits on the board of three for-profit small biotech companies and a number of not for profit organisations.

Fellowships