Stock Holm: Three research scholars of United States and Britain got Nobel Prize on Monday for their research on how human cells sense and adapt to changing oxygen levels. These researches opening up new strategies to fight common diseases such as cancer and anemia.

             William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza of the United States and Britain’s Peter Ratcliffe split the nine million Swedish kronor ($914,000, 833,000 euros) award. While the fact that humans need oxygen to survive has been centuries, how the body registers and responds to oxygen was little known prior to the trio’s pioneering work.

        “They established the basis for our understanding of how oxygen levels affect cellular metabolism and physiological function,” the jury said. Semenza studied a gene known as EPO which cause the body to create more red blood cells and isolated the specific DNA segments that help it to adapt to low oxygen levels.

     Ratcliffe and Semenza then applied this knowledge to show that the oxygen sensing mechanism was present in virtually all human tissues. Kaelin identified another gene presents in patients with a genetic disorder that puts them at far greater risk of certain cancers. The gene rewires the body’s ability to prevent the onset of cancer, and it plays a key role in how cancer cells respond to low oxygen levels.