The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2019

 

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine went to William G. Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe, Greg L. Semenza. The physiology and medicine award was awarded in recognition of its mechanism for dealing with hypoxia at the cell level. It is meaningful that hypoxia, which was understood only at the population level at the time, revealed the way to recognize and control hypoxia at the cell level and the mechanism to control it, and by doing so, it is also the significance of this study and the great achievement that the three scientists have made in academia.

 

 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2019/advanced-information/

 

Simply summarizing the key parts of the study, HIF-1α of the hypoxia inducible factor (HIF) binds to the HRE elements of the gene in low oxygen situations and raises the enterprise level. However, if you're out of a low-oxygen situation, that is, if the oxygen level is normal, HIF-1α becomes oxygen-dependent, hydrogen-dependent, and this is recognized by the VHL complex and degrade HIF-1α. In other words, it's a study that shows that the expression of certain genes is controlled through the stability (disassembly) difference of HIF-1 when there's low oxygen and not low oxygen conditions.

 

In particular, this study can be very important in the treatment of cancer and cardiovascular diseases, which are major causes of death. When cancer cells are proliferating and placed in a hypoxic environment, they create a lot of HIFs for their survival, which, if targeted and disassembled, could be an impediment to the survival of cancer cells. On the other hand, if you have to overcome a hypoxic environment due to clogging of blood vessels, you can create many HIFs or you can create treatments in a way that suppresses disassembly.

 

 

References

(1) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/

(2) Scientific Background: How cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability