So who was behind Gardasil? A key player was University of Washington epidemiology professor Laura Koutsky (pictured to the left), who’s credited with developing the HPV vaccine along with Kathrin Jansen, a yeast expert then at Merck Research Laboratories. Her studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Journal of Epidemiology, examined the disease’s natural history — what causes cervical cancer and HPV, who gets it and when. Without knowing those basics, it would have been impossible to make a vaccine, writes The Seattle Times, which profiles the researcher.

After a key clinical trial found that Gardasil worked against a prevalent HPV strain, they had to decide which strains to include in the vaccine that would go to the public. “Everyone agreed two of the four spots should go to HPV-16 and HPV-18, the virus types causing most cervical cancer,” the paper writes. “Koutsky wanted to fill the other two slots with two more cancer types. Jansen argued for a couple of genital wart virus types to make the vaccine appealing to men.”

“Because men don’t have cervixes, they can’t get cervical cancer. But like mosquitoes that transmit malaria to humans, men carry and transmit HPV to women. If both men and women were vaccinated, HPV rates might decrease faster in the general population, an effect known as herd immunity,” the paper continues.

‘ “Look, Laura,” Jansen recounts to the Times. “So what makes it palatable for a young man to get immunized if he doesn’t get a benefit for himself? You count on the goodwill of that person? You know, I imagine it must be quite devastating to have one of those big, ugly things growing on his penis, right? Certainly not very attractive, and the treatment is not particularly pleasant…” ‘

That’s true. Such reasoning, of course, is also smart marketing - making the vaccine appealing men to roughly doubles the potential market size, assuming regulatory approval is granted. Who said scientists don’t have a head for business?