Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2006 announcement

Angel · 09:20 AM

"For their discovery of RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA"

Americans Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine Monday for discovering a way to turn off the effect of specific genes.

"RNA interference" is already being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes and it is being studied as a treatment for virus infections, heart diseases, cancer and several other conditions.

Andrew Z. Fire

1/2 of the prizeUSAMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Cambridge, MA, USA; Stanford University School of Medicine

Stanford, CA, USAb. 1959

Links to other sites

Andrew Z. Fire's page at Stanford School of Medicine

Craig C. Mello

1/2 of the prize

USA

Harvard University

Boston, MA, USA; University of Massachusetts Medical School

Worcester, MA, USA

b. 1960

Links to other sites

Craig C. Mello's page at University of Massachusetts Medical School

Craig C. Mello's page at Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Fire, of Stanford University, and Mello, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, published their seminal work in 1998.

RNA interference occurs naturally in plants, animals, and humans. The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which awarded the prize, said it is important for regulating the activity of genes and helps defend against viral infection.

"This year's Nobel laureates have discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information," the institute said.

Genes produce their effect by sending molecules called messenger RNA to the protein-making machinery of a cell. In RNA interference, certain molecules trigger the destruction of RNA from a particular gene, so that no protein is produced. Thus the gene is effectively silenced.

Fire, who conducted the research while at the Carnegie Institution, said he was honored that the work "has received such positive attention."

"Science is a group effort. Please recognize that the recent progress in the field of RNA-based gene silencing has involved original scientific inquiry from research groups around the world," he said in a statement released by the Carnegie Institution.

The announcement opened this year's series of prize announcements. It will be followed by Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

Last year's medicine prize went to Australians Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren for discovering that bacteria, not stress, causes ulcers.

The Nobel committees do not reveal who has been nominated for the awards, but that does not stop experts and Nobel-watchers from speculating on potential winners.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in his will in the categories of literature, peace, medicine, physics and chemistry. The economics prize is technically not a Nobel but a 1968 creation of Sweden's central bank.

Winners receive a check of $1.4 million, handshakes with Scandinavian royalty, and a banquet on Dec. 10 - the anniversary of Nobel's death in 189. All prizes are handed out in Stockholm except for the peace prize, which is presented in Oslo.

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Angel · 04:42 AM

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to 186 persons since 1901.

2006 - Andrew Z. Fire, Craig C. Mello
2005 - Barry J. Marshall, J. Robin Warren
2004 - Richard Axel, Linda B. Buck
2003 - Paul C. Lauterbur, Sir Peter Mansfield
2002 - Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz, John E. Sulston
2001 - Leland H. Hartwell, Tim Hunt, Sir Paul Nurse
2000 - Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, Eric R. Kandel
1999 - Günter Blobel
1998 - Robert F. Furchgott, Louis J. Ignarro, Ferid Murad
1997 - Stanley B. Prusiner
1996 - Peter C. Doherty, Rolf M. Zinkernagel
1995 - Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Eric F. Wieschaus
1994 - Alfred G. Gilman, Martin Rodbell
1993 - Richard J. Roberts, Phillip A. Sharp
1992 - Edmond H. Fischer, Edwin G. Krebs
1991 - Erwin Neher, Bert Sakmann
1990 - Joseph E. Murray, E. Donnall Thomas
1989 - J. Michael Bishop, Harold E. Varmus
1988 - Sir James W. Black, Gertrude B. Elion, George H. Hitchings
1987 - Susumu Tonegawa
1986 - Stanley Cohen, Rita Levi-Montalcini
1985 - Michael S. Brown, Joseph L. Goldstein
1984 - Niels K. Jerne, Georges J.F. Köhler, César Milstein
1983 - Barbara McClintock
1982 - Sune K. Bergström, Bengt I. Samuelsson, John R. Vane
1981 - Roger W. Sperry, David H. Hubel, Torsten N. Wiesel
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf, Jean Dausset, George D. Snell
1979 - Allan M. Cormack, Godfrey N. Hounsfield
1978 - Werner Arber, Daniel Nathans, Hamilton O. Smith
1977 - Roger Guillemin, Andrew V. Schally, Rosalyn Yalow
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg, D. Carleton Gajdusek
1975 - David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco, Howard M. Temin
1974 - Albert Claude, Christian de Duve, George E. Palade
1973 - Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen
1972 - Gerald M. Edelman, Rodney R. Porter
1971 - Earl W. Sutherland, Jr.
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz, Ulf von Euler, Julius Axelrod
1969 - Max Delbrück, Alfred D. Hershey, Salvador E. Luria
1968 - Robert W. Holley, H. Gobind Khorana, Marshall W. Nirenberg
1967 - Ragnar Granit, Haldan K. Hartline, George Wald
1966 - Peyton Rous, Charles B. Huggins
1965 - François Jacob, André Lwoff, Jacques Monod
1964 - Konrad Bloch, Feodor Lynen
1963 - Sir John Eccles, Alan L. Hodgkin, Andrew F. Huxley
1962 - Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins
1961 - Georg von Békésy
1960 - Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Peter Medawar
1959 - Severo Ochoa, Arthur Kornberg
1958 - George Beadle, Edward Tatum, Joshua Lederberg
1957 - Daniel Bovet
1956 - André F. Cournand, Werner Forssmann, Dickinson W. Richards
1955 - Hugo Theorell
1954 - John F. Enders, Thomas H. Weller, Frederick C. Robbins
1953 - Hans Krebs, Fritz Lipmann
1952 - Selman A. Waksman
1951 - Max Theiler
1950 - Edward C. Kendall, Tadeus Reichstein, Philip S. Hench
1949 - Walter Hess, Egas Moniz
1948 - Paul Müller
1947 - Carl Cori, Gerty Cori, Bernardo Houssay
1946 - Hermann J. Muller
1945 - Sir Alexander Fleming, Ernst B. Chain, Sir Howard Florey
1944 - Joseph Erlanger, Herbert S. Gasser
1943 - Henrik Dam, Edward A. Doisy
1942 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1941 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1940 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1939 - Gerhard Domagk
1938 - Corneille Heymans
1937 - Albert Szent-Györgyi
1936 - Sir Henry Dale, Otto Loewi
1935 - Hans Spemann
1934 - George H. Whipple, George R. Minot, William P. Murphy
1933 - Thomas H. Morgan
1932 - Sir Charles Sherrington, Edgar Adrian
1931 - Otto Warburg
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1929 - Christiaan Eijkman, Sir Frederick Hopkins
1928 - Charles Nicolle
1927 - Julius Wagner-Jauregg
1926 - Johannes Fibiger
1925 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1924 - Willem Einthoven
1923 - Frederick G. Banting, John Macleod
1922 - Archibald V. Hill, Otto Meyerhof
1921 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1920 - August Krogh
1919 - Jules Bordet
1918 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1917 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1916 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1915 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1914 - Robert Bárány
1913 - Charles Richet
1912 - Alexis Carrel
1911 - Allvar Gullstrand
1910 - Albrecht Kossel
1909 - Theodor Kocher
1908 - Ilya Mechnikov, Paul Ehrlich
1907 - Alphonse Laveran
1906 - Camillo Golgi, Santiago Ramón y Cajal
1905 - Robert Koch
1904 - Ivan Pavlov
1903 - Niels Ryberg Finsen
1902 - Ronald Ross
1901 - Emil von Behring

Source: The Nobel Foundation

srijana

Dr. Craig Mello is mainly based on University of Massachussetts rather than in Harvard.

Angel · 12:18 AM

An RNA Remedy
The co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine explains how their award-winning research may lead to new treatments for diseases like macular degeneration, hepatitis C and cancer.

Paul Sakuma / AP (left); Brian Snyder / Reuters
Andrew Z. Fire (left) and Craig Mello will share the $1.37 million Nobel Prize in medicine

When Andrew Z. Fire was awakened by the phone call at 2 a.m. on Monday morning, he assumed it was a wrong number. "I thought it might have been a mistake," he remembers. It was not. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute had selected Fire, a professor of pathology and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, together with Craig Mello, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, to receive the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery in 1998 of a mechanism that can shut down certain genes. Their initial research on what was dubbed RNA interference was conducted on worms. But their findings hold promise for humans as well in treating—and maybe one day preventing—certain diseases. NEWSWEEK's Jennifer Barrett spoke with Fire about their work and who might benefit from it.

NEWSWEEK: You won the Nobel Prize for uncovering the process of RNA interference. Can you explain to our readers exactly what this entails?
Andrew Z. Fire: Our observations built on previous work by others in plants and fungi. When people tried to put extra copies of a gene into a plant, instead of getting more of the result, they got less. It seemed there was a way that the organism had to sense that there were extra copies—and not just extra copies but some that were also probably somehow messed up. So the organism had to be able to detect unwanted activity. And if it sensed this activity, which is going to come out in the form of some kind of RNA [an intermediary between stable DNA, which stores information in our genes, and proteins, which act on the information] that is unusual, it went ahead and got rid of them. We studied something similar with worms.

What did you find?
We wanted to know how an organism can tell the difference between foreign RNA and what's inside. It turns out it's a fairly simple structural distinction. If we took double-stranded RNA and put it into cells, that could shut a gene down pretty efficiently. The organism is looking for RNA where both strands present in the cell (normally, it's just one strand). That was essentially the result. We could put two strands of an RNA in and it would shut down the corresponding gene...The cell not only gets rid of double-stranded material but looks for anything that looks similar and gets rid of it too.

You studied RNA interference initially in microscopic roundworms. How does the process work in human cells?
Researchers knew that if you put double-stranded RNA into human cells, you don't get a specific knockdown of corresponding genes. It just shuts down the whole cell. So what other people did based on the knowledge of the double strand is to look for some kind of biochemical intermediate in the process that might be sufficient to give you a specific biologic single gene effect without the whole cell shutdown effect. A few years after our paper was published, Thomas Tuschl [an associate professor at Rockefeller University] figured out something called SiRNA, a specific double-stranded RNA, which could do interference in human cells [to shut down a gene without shutting down the whole cell].

What are the potential applications for humans?
The biggest medium-term application is researchers who are studying a given question. For example, let's say we're interested in an individual cancerous tumor—a population of cells that are doing something against our best interest—and want to know what makes it so we can get rid of it. One way is to go on a gene by gene basis through all the thousands of genes and decrease the function of each one at a time to figure out which are needed for the tumor to grow. The hope in that case is to find the gene that is needed for the tumor but not required for normal cell growth. So far, the experiment has been in a lab. If you had that information and really believed RNA to be a gene-silencing tool, though, you could imagine taking double-stranded RNA into a sick person and making them healthy. People are exploring that, but delivering it is very complicated. Some clinical trials are being done in tissues that are very good at receiving the RNA material like the eye and the liver.

What diseases are being targeted in the clinical trials?
One is macular degeneration, which causes blindness. The reason it's moved so quickly to clinical trials mostly has to do with the ethics of doing clinical trials. No other treatment is approved for macular degeneration. Also, the eye is fairly self-contained. It's easier to test it in the eye in a clinical trial than injecting it into the bloodstream.

Are there other possible benefits beyond using RNA as a drug?
The other half of it is that once you have a catalogue of genes that are important for a given tumor or virus or disease, you can look in the pharmaceutical guide to known drugs that block that gene product. Then we're not going to go to RNA interference for a cure, but to the drugstore essentially.

Has this been done already?
Yes, one good example is in Holland, at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, where researchers were looking at a rare cancerous tumor. They discovered some genes in the pathway that they knew could be inhibited by aspirin. They gave the patients a very concentrated form of aspirin to fight the tumor. One hopes that these sort of discoveries will be used not just to make miracle medicines but to guide treatment.

What other diseases could be targeted with this type of treatment?
People are talking about the hepatitis C virus, which is extremely nasty. One can imagine both injecting double stranded RNA into the body and identifying drugs that target certain genes. The other area where there is ongoing work is in respiratory viruses. In any given case, there's a chance therapy would work and also a chance it wouldn't be sufficient.

What work are you most excited about now?
I'm excited by all of it. Those of us doing the science are excited about how the process works and what it's doing there in the cells...

What are you working on now in the lab?
Most of our work is with small roundworms. The basic question is how the RNA honing mechanism is regulated and how it is turned on when it is needed and down when it is not needed, and how the process of targeting specific sequences seems to be set up to benefit the cell.

- Source: Newsweek October 4, 2006