Dr. William Kaelin (Harvard University); Sir Peter Ratcliffe (Professor at Oxford and Director of Clinical Research at Francis Crick Institute in London); and Gregg Semenza (Professor of Medicine at John Hopkins University) won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Their work laid the foundation for understanding of how oxygen levels affect cellular metabolism and physiological function. Oxygen levels affect cellular metabolism and physiological function.
Their discoveries have fundamental importance of physiology and have paved the way for promising new strategies to fight anemia, cancer and other diseases.
In the case of cancer, we want to create drugs that block the oxygen supply so that cancer cells do not create the blood vessels necessary for their development.
To understand the importance of their discoveries, it’s important to understand the how your body needs complex ways to regulate oxygen levels. Oxygen is pretty fundamental to everything that you do. Without it, the trillions and trillions of cells in your body couldn’t survive and function. Each cell uses oxygen to help break down nutrients into energy. Thus, no oxygen, no energy! No energy, no cells, and no you.
The trouble is oxygen isn’t always present at the levels that you and all your cells would like. Oxygen levels can fluctuate in the air that you breathe and in different parts of your body. The ability of each of your cells to get oxygen can depend heavily on “location, location, location,” as the old real estate saying goes
How the Body Regulates Oxygen?
In response to low oxygen levels in the blood, the body produces a hormone called EPO. The hormone stimulates bone marrow to produce red blood cells which carry oxygen throughout the body
A gene in the cell’s nucleus produces EPO. The gene is activated by a chemical messenger called HIF
HIF is degraded when there is a lack of oxygen and it is unable to produce EPO
Originally published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune
