Nobel medicine 2019 .. successful battle against cancer

"There are no shortcuts to get to this place"

(William Kaelin)

Have you ever asked yourself how the pain reliever you took to overcome a somewhat severe headache? It was only half an hour when the intensity of the pain began to decrease gradually, until it disappeared completely. If we lived two hundred years from now, people would say that it is magic, but of course it is not, but it is a degree of accuracy unprecedented in our entire history, even That we can really call it magic!

Well, to understand it, let's start from yesterday, when Greg Semenza of Johns Hopkins University, Peter Ratcliffe of Oxford University, and William Kaelin of Harvard University were announced to be awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology to enable them to uncover how cells feel. The presence of oxygen in its surroundings, and how it adapts to the change in its quantity, but .. What is the relationship of Noble Medicine and Physiology to the analgesic tablet that we talked about a while ago?

In fact, a drug is a chemical that enters our bodies to activate or prevent an effect.This means that it goes to a specific place within the body and then interacts with it to function. Therefore, before creating a new drug, we need to understand the composition of a specific area of The body is so meticulously accurate that we can identify the chemical compounds in it, and then examine how we can influence that area to stimulate or prevent its activity.

Cells that breathe

Before the advent of Gregg Siemensa's research, in the 1990s, all we knew was that our cells deal very precisely with oxygen. The lower the amount, the kidneys produced the erythropoietin (EPO) hormone, among other responses, which in turn helps produce Larger than the red blood cells, which increases the blood's ability to carry oxygen, and therefore deals with it more sensitively than usual, balancing the effects of its decline, so that we can adapt to lower rates of oxygen, this is what is actually happening in those who live in High areas where oxygen is less than normal.

However, we did not know the exact molecular mechanism by which this process is carried out. At this point, Siemens, who came to this range by chance after his research attempts at several previous laboratories failed, then gives attention to how we can use mice. Genetically modified to explore the structure of some genes, and then focused on the gene responsible for the formation of the hormone erythropoietin, but .. What gene?

Very nice, now we are standing face to face in front of the first parts of the discovery that got the Nobel Medicine 2019, but before starting let's go back a little to high school in order to learn in a very simplified about some molecular biology that will benefit us a lot in what is coming, we know that acid The DNA of each organism is like a huge book that contains the code of all its visible qualities, for example, body length, ear shape, eye color, nose shape, hair color, cell function and shape, etc., everything, and DNA is a long chemical compound Extremely it takes the form of a double bar, but it consists mainly of a sequence of four units, we call them the English letters "C", "T", "G" and "A".

These units are repeated along the long strip of DNA about 3 billion times, and each group expresses an adjective, meaning that the sequence "UUCCGCATACGAA" for example expresses an adjective, and be eye color, while the sequence "UUUCATGGACTAU", although it contains the same number of But it expresses another characteristic, let alone the form of hair, this sequence of chemical units that express the characteristic of what we call "gene", and may require one gene in simple organisms, or more than one in complex organisms such as humans. It's like writing a program in a computer language. It might be a car game running in the streets of California or Baghdad, but it's basically a set of letters written somehow and recorded in the device's memory.

Trip to look for protein

When Siemens began examining the gene responsible for the formation of erythropoietin, he discovered that there was an area next to it - in the DNA - that affects its activity, and that region binds to two proteins called HIF, when the amount of oxygen in the cell decreases. To produce erythropoietin, which pushes the cell to adapt to the new low-oxygen situation, when oxygen levels again rise to a normal level, one of the proteins breaks down and stops the production of erythropoietin.

In that period, in the mid-1990s, Peter Ratcliffe was standing at the same research point with Siemens, coming to the same conclusions, adding together an unforeseen surprise, when they discovered that HIF was not only part of a process that circulates in cell tissues. This means that they have a key role in balancing the body's response to the presence of oxygen, which opened the door to dealing with what they discovered as a fundamental shift in this research area, but the question that continued to arouse the attention of both Siemens and Ratcliffe in That point was about how Haif breaks, where does he go? And how does this happen?

Here, William Kaelin enters the field with another surprise, where he was interested in studying a genetic disease called "von Hebel Lindau disease" and is caused by a mutation of a gene, families associated with this disease was associated with the incidence of cancer rates higher than usual and by a clear margin, which meant that There is a role for the gene responsible for this disease in cancer, in a clearer sense: If the mutation that stops the action of a gene causes cancer, then the natural gene must stop it.

Together with Ratcliffe, the team was able to conclude that this gene is responsible for producing a protein that blocks HIV proteins. As long as this gene is related to cancer, it means that cancer cells use the same mechanism to grow and bifurcate, meaning they activate proteins. Even in normal oxygen levels, the number of red blood cells surrounding them increases and grows even further.

Tampering with cancer

At this point, we are putting a new mechanism through which cancer cells can be tampered with by designing drugs that prevent HIF proteins from working in normal oxygen, which may prevent cancer cells from growing and bifurcating, reducing the development of some cancers. The scope of the benefits of these discoveries is more extensive than cancer.We are talking about oxygen, the main secret of life.It gives our cells the energy to live exactly as it allows the candle light to continue, without oxygen extinguishing the candle, as well as life.

Therefore, besides the support that such discoveries will provide in the treatment of many diseases such as kidney failure, cancer, stroke, bacterial infections, anemia, wound healing problems, heart disease and immune diseases, improving our understanding of natural processes such as exercise, how fetal growth and metabolic processes - and breathing of course - will open a door. The new condition of Alfred Nobel, which he left in his will, says that the Nobel laureate should be of great benefit to all mankind.

Nobel 2019 for medicine and physiology is a message for young researchers that says, `` Keep searching. '' There are a lot of very subtle and unknown things in our bodies, and whenever we understand one of them, it opens up a completely new pope to treat more diseases or at least improve our lives, so We can say that in an age where the most powerful task is the creation of knowledge, here you will not be surprised when you find that Ratcliffe's response - in a telephone call to the Nobel Prize platform on the Internet - read: "I work in the knowledge industry."

Unfortunately, the road is long, and there is no promise of a free dinner. In the words of Kaelin: “There are no shortcuts to get to this place.” In fact, a simple look at the triumph of the Nobel triumph over the past few decades will teach you that there are no Clearly to accomplish, there is a lot of confusion, boredom and frustration, and of course a lot of work, with insufficient results guaranteed, but it is - in the words of James Allison, Nobel laureate last year - seemed worth it.

What is most exciting at this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology is the delicate ability of science to probe and identify its very small sides. The tiny piece of DNA that Siemens first worked on lies on a 2-meter-long band wrapped around itself. So little space, the nucleus of one of the 37 trillion cells in your body, can you imagine how accurate? Previously they said that finding a "needle" in a haystack is such a difficult task that we give the example, what about a protein in a cell ?!