Nordic Life Science 1
dentifying a tumor’s distress call for oxygen, an
d knowing how to shut down its supply, can help thwart cancer and aid the development of cancer-fighting drugs, according to work by William Kaelin, MD. Kaelin won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on how cells sense and adapt to the availability of oxygen. His research has shed light on the effects of mutations in tumor-suppressor genes in the emergence of cancer. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Co-winners in the same category were Peter Ratcliffe from the University of Oxford and the Francis Crick Institute, and Gregg Semenza from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. They were all involved in similar work. The early hour of the award phone call and the excitement it generated gave the event a dreamlike quality, Kaelin says. “I’ve used the word surreal because it does feel surreal in that moment,” Kaelin told Nordic Life Science. “I was also half-asleep,” he joked. “But I think every scientist dreams this might happen, but it is so improbable, you think it won’t happen. I remember being flooded with a sense of gratitude. I have been so fortunate in my scientific career and I have had such wonderfully supportive family, friends, trainees and colleagues – and also some luck in science in that the mechanism we discovered turned out to be beautiful and prize-worthy.” While he and Semenza worked in similar areas, they did not collaborate; Kaelin calls them friendly competitors. “It’s a fallacy that if scientists collaborated more, progress would come faster,” Kaelin states. “Collaboration goes on all the time – but too much collaboration can be bad. If everyone goes in the same direction they could all go off a cliff. It is better to follow your own nose and go in the direction you feel is right.” Studies of tumor blood flow and how cells adjust to oxygen levels are critical to developing cancer treatments that can literally suffocate tumors. Most, if not all, cancers need to obtain an oxygen delivery system, notes Kaelin. “Once we understood the oxygen-sensing pathway, we could develop drugs that worked on specific nodes of the pathway. Now we can make drugs that block the pathway or enhance the pathway, decreasing or increasing oxygen delivery, depending on the disease to be treated.” NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG 65 © NOBEL MEDIA AB PHOTO ALEXANDER MAHMOUD