The 2018 Prince Mahidol Award laureates were honoured for their research on cancer and cholera vaccination at an award ceremony at the Grand Palace on Thursday.
Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, as the Representative of His Majesty the King, conferred the Prince Mahidol Award for 2018 to four laureates at the Chakri Throne Hall.
The Field of Medicine award went to Prof Brian J Druker, 63, a physician at the Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland, Oregon and Prof Mary-Claire King, 72, a human geneticist at the University of Washington.
In the field of Public Health, the award went to Dr John D Clemens, 69, director of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology, University of California Los Angeles' Fielding School of Public Health, and Prof Jan R Holmgren, 74, from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
They were selected from a total of 49 nominees from 25 countries by the Prince Mahidol Award Foundation's committee, chaired by the princess.
"The Prince Mahidol Award recognises the great discoveries by Prof Brian J Druker, for a prototype of a drug used in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), which advances the development of targeted therapy, and by Prof Mary-Claire King, for identifying the most common and heritable gene related to breast cancer, as well as developing a breast cancer gene detection kit to provide effective screening and monitoring for people at risk," the Prince Mahidol Award Foundation's committee said.
Prof Clemens and Prof Holmgren were honoured for their work to push for orally taken cholera vaccines rather than injections.