Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded to Hypoxia Researchers
As a geneticist, he was trained to study rare genetic diseases. But his work on cellular responses to oxygen led him to study such common diseases as heart disease and cancer. At first, he divided his attention between the two conditions. More recently, Dr. Semenza said, he has focused on cancer, looking for ways to use what he has learned to find new ways to attack tumors.
Dr. Semenza was asleep when the call from Sweden came this morning, and did not get to his phone in time to answer it. The phone rang again a few minutes later. “I heard this very distinguished gentleman tell me I was going to receive the Nobel Prize,” he said. “I was shocked, of course. And I was kind of in a daze. I’ve been in a daze ever since.” But he added, “It’s been wonderful.”
Peter J. Ratcliffe, the third Nobelist, is the Director of Clinical Research at the Francis Crick Institute in London and the Director of the Target Discovery Institute at Oxford.
He became a medical researcher almost by chance. “I was a tolerable schoolboy chemist and intent on a career in industrial chemistry,” he said in a speech in 2016. “The ethereal but formidable headmaster appeared one morning in the chemistry classroom. ‘Peter,’ he said with unnerving serenity, ‘I think you should study medicine’. And without further thought, my university application forms were changed.”
He became a kidney specialist, fascinated by the way the organs regulate production of EPO in response to the amount of oxygen available. Some colleagues, he said, felt this was not very important.
But he persisted, intrigued by the scientific puzzle. “We set about the problem of EPO regulation, which might have been seen, and some did see, as a niche area,” he said in a telephone inter- view posted by the Nobel Committee on Twitter.“
But I believed it was tractable, it could be solved by someone. The impact of that became evident later.”
The research is an illustration of the value of basic research, he added: “We make knowledge, That’s what I do as a publicly funded scientist. It is good knowledge. It is true. It is correct.”
But, he added, “We set out on a journey without a clear understanding of the value of that knowledge.”
When the call from Sweden came, Dr. Ratcliffe was writing a grant proposal. Today he will continue working on it.
“I’m happy about it,” he said of the Nobel Prize. But he was not enthusiastic about being thrust into the public eye.
“I’ll do my duty, I hope,” he said.
“It’s a tribute to the lab, to those who helped me set it up and worked with me on the project over the years, to many others in the field, and not least to my family for their forbearance of all the up and downs,” he said in a statement released by Oxford.
How this discovery can help fight diseases
This year's Nobel prize winning oxygen study could result in treatments for a variety of diseases, including cancer, heart attack and stroke. While declaring this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the award committee said that labs and pharmaceutical companies around the world were racing to develop drugs “that can interfere with different disease states by either activating, or blocking, the oxygen- sensing machinery.”
The discovery means that we now understand the processes behind the generation of new blood vessels, the production of red blood cells, certain immune system functions and even fetal and placenta development. We, therefore, know much more about the diseases arising from these pathways, such as cancers that proliferate using the oxygen-sensing system to grow tumours. All across the globe, there are now ongoing efforts by academics, entrepreneurs and pharmaceutical companies focused on developing drugs that can either inhibit or activate this oxygen-sensing machinery.
Many potential therapies are already exploiting this newly-acquired under- standing. China, for instance, is close to clinically testing a therapy that would help treat anaemia. Medical scientists elsewhere, similarly, hope that HIF-1a may offer a magic bullet to deal with some of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer in the near future.
Roxadustat and daprodustat, treat anaemia by increasing red blood cell production, and similar drugs are aiming to treat patients with heart disease and lung cancer that struggle with hypoxia. More experimental drugs are also blocking blood vessel formation, aiming to prevent tumour growth in some cancers.
Experts say the discoveries were integral to the development angiogenesis blockers like Avastin (bevacizumab), which treat cancer by blocking tumor cells’ ability to trigger the growth of new blood vessels they need to obtain oxygen and nutrients. Angiogenesis blockers are used to treat a variety of cancers, including malignancies of the brain, kidney, lung and colon. In many cases, the drugs are used in combination with other treatments, including chemotherapy. The discoveries could also help lead to the development of new drugs for heart attack and stroke. Both conditions are marked by cell damage resulting from interruption of the delivery of oxygen-rich blood to critical tissues.
