The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to NIH-funded researchers Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their fundamental work with telomeres. Drs. Blackburn and Szostak discovered a DNA sequence in telomeres that protects the chromosomes form degradation, and Drs. Blackburn and Greider identified the enzyme telomerase, which synthesizes the telomere DNA. These discoveries have had huge impacts in cellular biology, especially in the fields of cancer and aging.
NIH-funded researchers Drs. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath have been awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work mapping the structure of the ribosome, a discovery used in the development of new antibiotics.
Three of the 2009 Lasker Awards have also gone to NIH-funded researchers, Drs. Brian Druker, Charles Sawyers and Shinya Yamanaka. Drs. Brian Druker and Dr. Charles Sawyers share the 2009 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Research Award with Dr. Nicholas B. Lydon for their work on chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and the development of the pharmaceutical Gleevac. Interferon treatments, the previous standard treatment for CML patients, could prolong survival by an average of 2 years, but Gleevac boosts the survival rate of CML patients to 90% at 5 years.
Dr. Shinya Yamanaka shares the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award with Dr. John Gurdon for research that has successfully reprogrammed fully differentiated mouse and human skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells capable of specializing into many fetal and adult types of cells. This technology may open doors in personalized cell-replacement therapies and tissue transplant without the risks of immune rejection.
NIH is proud to have supported the work of these scientists and heartily congratulates them on their contributions to the treatment of disease and the understanding of cellular mechanisms. For more information on the 2009 awardees, visit http://nobelprize.org/ and http://www.laskerfoundation.org.
0 Comments