Trio win Nobel Medicine Prize for work on cells, oxygen

Stockholm: US researchers William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza and Britain's Peter Ratcliffe on Monday shared the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability, the Nobel Assembly said.

"They established the basis for our understanding of how oxygen levels affect cellular metabolism and physiological function," the jury said.

Their research has "paved the way for promising new strategies to fight anaemia, cancer and many other diseases."

The jury said the trio had identified molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen, which is central to a large number of diseases.

Kaelin works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US, while Semenza is the director of the Vascular Research Program at the John Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering.

Ratcliffe is the director of clinical research at the Francis Crick Institute in London, and director of the Target Discovery Institute in Oxford.

The three will share the Nobel prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor (about USD 914,000).