By: Katherine Ellen Foley
October 7, 2019
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This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to three scientists whose work focused on understanding how our cells take in various levels of oxygen.
This fundamental process is key to embryonic development, adapting to high altitude, and exercising. The Nobel Assembly based at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, which made the announcement early on the morning of Oct. 7, also noted that the process plays a role in developing treatments for anemia, a common blood disorder in which there aren’t enough red blood cells able to carry oxygen to different tissues in the body, along with various type of cancers.
The winners of the prize—William Kaelin Jr., currently at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland; Sir Peter Ratcliffe, currently at the University of Oxford and Francis Crick Institute in London; and Gregg Semenza, currently at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland—will split the prize money, worth just over $9 million, equally. Want to understand why their work is important? Take a deep breath, and get ready to dive in.
Every one of your trillions of cells—and really, all animal cells everywhere on the planet—use oxygen from the air to turn food into usable energy.
Oxygen molecules we inhale through the lungs can cross over into tiny blood vessels, where they hitch a ride on the hemoglobin proteins that are present in red blood cells—the body’s life-delivering postal service. Red blood cells ferry oxygen to each tissue, where cells let in just enough to carry out a precise amount of work.
There are two big variables our bodies have to juggle, though: First, depending on where you are, there aren’t always consistent levels of oxygen available. For example, the higher you travel, the thinner the air, and the less oxygen is present in the air—a condition called hypoxia. Second, your cells need to make more or less energy, and therefore need more or less oxygen, depending on whether you’re being active or sedentary. Healthy individuals can rapidly adjust the amount of oxygen they take in.
This year’s three Nobel prize winners all conducted research that helps explain how cells sense oxygen levels, and how they adapt to higher or lower amounts of the molecule in the atmosphere. When the body detects that less oxygen is present, the kidneys release a hormone called erythropoietin, or EPO, which tells the body to make more red blood cells to carry more oxygen around.
Decades of work from Semenza and Ratcliffe identified how this system works in more detail: They found that a protein called hypoxia-inducible factor, or HIF, rises when there’s less oxygen around. HIF then bonds to sections of DNA near the gene that produces EPO. Extra HIF protein around the EPO gene acts like a turbo charge for the hormone’s production, which is how the body knows to make more red blood cells. When there’s sufficient oxygen available again, HIF levels drop, as do red blood cell counts.
Targets for numerous conditions
Now that researchers understand how the body regulates oxygen uptake, they can try to develop new therapies for individuals for whom that process has gone awry.
