Culture & Education | Wednesday 11 March, 2015 9:31 am |

Winners of the 37th annual King Faisal International Prize (KFIP) have been taking part in a series of public lectures in Riyadh this week, sharing the ideas that earned them Saudi Arabia’s most prestigious academic accolade.

Winner of the 2015 prize for medicine, Professor Jeffery Gordon was unfortunately unable to travel to Saudi Arabia to be presented to King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, so his lecture was delivered virtually, at a presentation at King Faisal Specialist Hospital (in collaboration with the Alfaisal University College of Medicine) on March 05.

The King Faisal International Prize for Medicine was first awarded in 1982, with winners reflecting current areas of international human health concerns. Winners must have carried out and published original medical research on the prize’s topic with major benefits to humanity, the prize being decided entirely on merit, and with no regard to ethnicity, race, religion or gender.

US citizen Gordon, the Director of the Centre of Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University in St Louis, US, was honoured in recognition of his seminal work on defining the role of microbiomes – the genomes of the microorganisms that reside in the human gut – in human health.

Gordon was honoured for his discovery linking nutritional health to the inner workings of the tens of trillions of microbes that live in the gut. His research focuses on how this influences overall gut function and shapes various aspects of human physiology, metabolism and nutritional status.

Studies in his laboratory have opened an entire new field of research focusing on the gut microbiome. Over the past decade, Gordon has uncovered a compelling link between the gut microbiome and obesity as well as the metabolic abnormalities associated with being overweight.

Since the inception of the Prize in 1976, 239 winners from 42 nations have been honoured, with 17 KFIP laureates also honoured with the Nobel Prize, eight with the American Medals of Science, while five are medallists of the Royal Society in the UK, underlining the international importance of the King Faisal International Prize.