Gardisil (HPV Vaccine)

Heralded as the first “cancer vaccine” in the world, the HPV vaccine was developed by a team of Georgetown University researchers- led by Dr. Richard Schlegel- in the early nineties to block infections associated with four types of human papilloma virus, including two that cause nearly seventy-five percent of cervical cancer cases and two other strains that cause fifty percent of genital warts.

Dr. Richard Schlegel

Richard Schlegel is a professor of Pathology at Georgetown University, and is widely regarded as the principle investigator behind the development of the technology for the HPV Vaccine. The U.S. patent office awarded his Georgetown laboratory’s HPV vaccine technology in 2005, with the The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the HPV vaccine in 2006. 

In 1980 Dr. Richard Schlegel started off as an investigator at the national Cancer Institute and then became a senior investigator. He then went on to serve as Chief of the Cell Regulation and Transformation Section in the Laboratory of Tumor Virus Biology at NCI. Dr. Schlegel joined GUMC as an Associate Professor in the Department of pathology in 1990, in 2003 he became the chair of the pathology department. He is currently serving on the editorial board of the journal Virology and serves as a permanent member of the NIH Virology study section.