Finnish professor wins top international prize for medicine

Professor Kari Alitalo at the University of Helsinki was awarded the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine 2014, Finnish media reported on Tuesday. Alitalo is one of the five internationally-renowned scientists who received the prestigious Heineken Prize granted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, according to Finnish national broadcaster YLE. Born in 1952 in Kuopio of Finland, Alitalo is the academy professor for molecular biology of cancer at the University of Helsinki. He is one of the world's best-known cancer and molecular biology researchers. Alitalo is the first Finnish scientist who has won the prize. He was awarded "for his pioneering research on how and when lymph and blood vessels grow, and how that knowledge could help us to find interventions to treat cancer and other diseases," said the Dutch Academy. The award ceremony for Heineken Prizes 2014 will be held on October 2 this year in Amsterdam. The Heineken Prizes, founded by Alfred Heineken in the 1960s, consist of five science prizes: the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prizes for History, Medicine, Environmental science and Cognitive science, as well as the Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics. The prizes are 200,000 U.S. dollars each awarded every other year to five scientists. The Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for medicine is specially awarded to a scientist who has conducted pioneering medical research.