Britain’s Peter Ratcliffe and William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza of US shared the 2019 Nobel Medicine Prize for their work on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.
The team revealed the understanding of how oxygen levels affect cellular metabolism.
They identified the molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes to varying levels of oxygen.
It has paved way to understand the strategies to fight cancer, anaemia and other diseases.
Based on their findings pharma companies are now on the path of developing drugs that can interfere with “disease states” by activating or blocking the oxygen – level in the cells.