Medicine Nobel won by Americans and a Briton

Two American scientists and a Briton have won the Nobel medicine prize.

The winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Gregg Semenza of the US, left, Peter Ratcliffe of Britain and William Kaelin of the US. Picture: AFP

This year’s Nobel prize for medicine was given for “a fundamental basic science discovery about how the body adapts to different levels of oxygen”.

The joint winners — William Kaelin, Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza — were awarded for their discoveries that would help in the treatment of some cancers, heart disease and blindness.

Nils-Goran Larsson, a Nobel Committee member at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, said that ­although humans were surrounded by oxygen “we have to adapt to different oxygen levels — for instance if we start living at higher altitude we have to adapt and get more red blood cells, more blood vessels, and also in different disease processes the regulation of oxygen and the metabolism is very important”.

He said people with renal failure often received hormonal treatment for anaemia.

“With this discovery system there are alternative ways of doing this and developing similar treatments,’’ he said.

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore was celebrating Dr Semenza’s win, saying his work at the university had “far-reaching implications in understanding the impacts of low oxygen levels in blood disorders, blinding eye diseases, cancer, diabetes, coronary artery disease, and other conditions”.

Dr Semenza shares the award with Professor Kaelin from Harvard University, and Sir Peter, professor at Oxford University.

Professor Kaelin said he was half asleep when his phone rang at his Boston home at 4:50am.

“I was aware as a scientist that if you get a phone call at 5am with too many digits, it’s sometimes very good news, and my heart started racing. It was all a bit surreal,” he said.

Professor Kaelin said “the molecular pathway that my fellow prize winners and I helped to define converges on a protein called HIF, and as a result of this work there are now opportunities to either increase or decrease HIF”.

He said drugs are being developed to do that. Certain diseases like anaemia might be treated by increasing HIF, while inhibiting that protein could help with other diseases including certain cancers.

Andrew Murray of the University of Cambridge said the three winners “revealed the ­elegant mechanisms by which our cells sense oxygen levels and respond to fluctuations”.

Dr Murray said that hypoxia — when the body doesn’t have enough oxygen — is a characteristic of many diseases including heart failure, chronic lung disease and many cancers.

He said the Nobel winners’ work had “paved the way to greater understanding of these common, life-threatening conditions and new strategies to treat them”.

The Karolinska Institutet said the trio should share equally the 9 million kronor ($1.45m) cash award.

The winners of this year’s Nobel prizes are to be announced over the next week, and include two literature laureates on Thursday and the coveted Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The physics prize will be awarded on Tuesday night, followed by chemistry. The economics prize will be awarded next Monday.

AP