THE ADAO AWARD

One young investigator award is given in honor of ADAO, the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization http://www.asbestosdiseaseawareness.org/. ADAO is an independent nonprofit organization working for awareness, advocacy, and prevention of asbestos diseases and the support and cure of victims.  A monetary prize was donated to support this award by Steven Kazan of Kazan, McClain, Lyons, Greenwood & Harley of Oakland, CA USA.
The prize was presented by Linda Reinstein, CEO and Co-Founder of the ADAO.
The award was presented to Spoponki Kgalamono from The National Institute for Occupational Health in Johannesburg South Africa for her work describing the rates of pleural mesothelioma in South Africa from 1995-2006. In this work, she and her colleagues showed that the age standardized mortality rate was 11-15 per million in men and 3-5 million per year in women, lower than expected probably because of under-ascertainment and also because of shortened lifespan due to HIV/AIDS.

THE IBAS AWARD

One young investigator award is given in honor of IBAS, the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat, http://ibasecretariat.org/ This organization was established in 2000 to achieve a global asbestos ban and to alleviate the damage caused by widespread asbestos use.
A monetary prize was donated to support this award by Steven Kazan of Kazan, McClain, Lyons, Greenwood & Harley of Oakland, CA USA.
The IBAS award was presented to Isabelle Opitz of the Division of Thoracic Surgery, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland for a poster presentation on the role of ERCC1, the excision repair cross-complementation group 1 protein. Despite the expectation that the expression of this protein predicts response to platinum based chemotherapy, Dr. Opitz found that the expression of ERCC1 failed to correlate with either response to chemotherapy or survival for mesothelioma patients.

THE BANJAN AWARD

One young investigator award is given in honor of BANJAN, the Ban Asbestos Network Japan. This organization, composed of trade unions, citizens groups and individuals, is dedicated to raising awareness about the hazards of asbestos and supporting victims.
A monetary prize was donated to support this award by Steven Kazan of Kazan, McClain, Lyons, Greenwood & Harley of Oakland, CA USA.
The prize was awarded to Ryoji Eguchi of the Department of Thoracic Oncology, Hyogo College of Medicine, Hyogo, Japan for his work on the mechanism by which arsenic trioxide, a clinical treatment for certain leukemias, induces apoptosis in mesothelioma cells.