This year's Nobel prizes

Mon, 12 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Three of this year’s nobel prizes were given for topics we work on: The prize in Medicine was shared by Youyou Tu and William Campbell/Satoshi Ōmura. Campbell and Ōmura received their share for the development of an anti-parasite drug that is effective against roundworms (nematodes), which are the cause of river blindness, lymphatic filariasis and a few other diseases. Nematodes, that cause lymphatic filariasis (like Brugia malayi) are living in the lymphatic system. Many nematodes do express a VEGF-C-like molecule, but the function of this parasite-VEGF-C for the nematode’s life cycle has never been looked at.The prize in Chemistry was shared by Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. We are right now experimenting with such mechanisms, especially the cytidine deamination, which we exploit in order to generate mutations on demand. When cytidine is converted into uracil (which can happen spontaneously or mediated by an enzyme), the enzyme Uracil-DNA glycosylase (UNG) removes the uracil base. Then another enzyme (apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease) cleaves the backbone 5’ to the abasic site and DNA polymerase beta excises the abasic sugar phosphate residue and inserts a cytosine thus repairing the damage.The third prize is the one in Economic Sciences, which went to Angus Deaton. “He pioneered the analysis of individual dynamic consumption behavior under idiosyncratic uncertainty and liquidity constraints.” (from the Advanced Information PDF by the Royal Academy. I freely translate: He researched how peoples ‘spending behaviour changes in the face of irregular and insufficient income. That describes quite well our lab’s financial situation and we indeed work on that issue, because science without money doesn’t work.

A Nobel Prize for angiogenesis research?

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In 2008, during a dinner in Stockholm (when I participated in the Novo Nordisk Foundation 8th Annual Conference on Vascular Biology in Diabetes Complications) I proposed to Christer Betsholtz to award the Nobel Prize to the world-wide community of postdocs, which are the unsung heroes of today’s research. But the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation forbid to award the price to more than three people. However, statutes can be changed and the Nobel Foundation did exactly that 40 years ago when they stopped awarding the price to dead people. And in this changing world, less and less discoveries and inventions are made by individuals. But here’s my newest proposal, which adheres to the rule of maximally three: Kari Alitalo is probably the only Nobel Prize worthy researcher in the country where I work (Finland). Seriously: after Judah Folkman has passed away, there are not many options to award the prize to somebody from the angiogenesis field. Judah Folkman was the father of the hypothesis, that all tumors should be treatable by anti-angiogenesis ( Folkman J. Tumor Angiogenesis: Therapeutic Implications. New England Journal of Medicine. 1971;285(21):1182–6 ). The Nobel Prize committee missed that chance. And because the field has already significantly contributed to the treatment of cancer (and arguably will still contribute much), it is not so far off to think of a shared prize for the discoverers of the VEGFs. VEGF was discovered more or less independently by several research groups around 25 years ago, among them Napoleone Ferrara ’s and Harold Dvorak ’s. Most notably, Ferrara’s group at Genentech continued the research most successfully until today resulting in the first antiangiogenic cancer drug in 2004. While the discovery of VEGF and the resulting angiogenesis research was not dependent on any single lab, the lymphangiogenesis field was essentially single-handedly re-invented and brought into the molecular era by Kari Alitalo in the years following 1995 - after it had become senile and was lingering without any significant progress since the 1960s. A shared prize to Ferrara, Dvorak and Alitalo? There is an anti-VEGF-A cancer drug on the market and the only thing lacking is a successful anti- or pro-VEGF-C drug. Both are in clinical trials as of this writing ( anti-VEGF-C , pro-VEGF-C ).

Nobel Prize on Michael’s Domain

This year's Nobel prizes

A Nobel Prize for angiogenesis research?