ABOVE: © NOBEL MEDIA 2019. ILLUSTRATION: NIKLAS ELMEHED
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to William Kaelin of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Peter Ratcliffe of the University of Oxford and the Francis Crick Institute, and Gregg Semenza of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability,” the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute announced today (October 7).
In 1995, Semenza’s lab was the first to identify the genes that encode hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1), a transcription factor that alters cellular responses to low oxygen. His group found that HIF-1 responds to low oxygen levels by controlling which genes are used in a cell. The protein enables cancer cells to live in the low-oxygen conditions found within tumors, and helps the body respond to cardiovascular events that limit oxygen flow to parts of the ...
