Source:THE ECONOMIC TIMES-8th October,2019
US researchers William Kaelin and
Gregg Semenza and Britain’s Peter Ratcliffe on Monday shared the Nobel Medicine
Prize for discoveries on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability, the
Nobel Assembly said. “They established the basis for our understanding of how
oxygen levels affect cellular metabolism and physiological function,” the jury
said.
Their research has “paved the way
for promising new strategies to fight anemia, cancer and many other diseases”.
The jury said the trio had
identified molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response
to varying levels of oxygen, which is central to a large number of diseases.
“Intense ongoing efforts in academic
laboratories and pharmaceutical companies are now focused on developing drugs
that can interfere with different disease states by either activating, or
blocking, the oxygen-sensing machinery,” the jury said.
Kaelin works at the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute in the US while Semenza is director of the Vascular Research
Program at the John Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering.
Ratcliffe is director of clinical
research at the Francis Crick Institute in London, and director of the Target
Discovery Institute in Oxford.
The three will share the Nobel prize
sum of nine million Swedish kronor (about $914,000).
They will receive their prize from
King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.
Last year, the honour went to
immunologists James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, for figuring
out how to release the immune system’s brakes to allow it to attack cancer
cells more efficiently.
