( L - R ) Fire and Melo
STOCKHOLM (Reuters):
Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the 2006 Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday for their discovery of how to switch off genes, a potential road to new treatments for diseases from AIDS to blindness and cancer.
Fire, 47, and Mello, 45, are among the youngest in recent history to win the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns (US$1.37 million). Their work, which was published in 1998, received remarkably swift recognition.
Through experiments with worms, the two showed that a double strand of ribonucleic acid, or RNA, the genetic messenger of the cell, can 'silence' targeted genes in a process known as RNA interference (RNAi).
RNAi has grown quickly into a hot area of research for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies who see it as a promising way of tackling a range of conditions.
"Craig's and my work (concerned) why some genes get turned off," Fire told Reuters.
"We were trying to manipulate them and we found certain things could turn them off very efficiently ... Knowing the genes doesn't tell you what they do, so if you start to turn them off you can start to learn what they do."
The discoveries may lead to methods to stop gene expression in diseases such as cancer, slowing tumour growth.
"The discovery is already being used in clinical trials for viral diseases, for eye diseases, for cardiovascular metabolic diseases," Bertil Fredholm, a member of the prize-giving Nobel Assembly of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, told Reuters.
"But even more importantly, it is being used in every drug industry as a fundamental research tool," he added, saying RNAi has "invaded" laboratories worldwide.
Phillip Sharp of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts, himself a 1993 Nobel prize winner, has used RNAi to kill HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
UNUSUALLY FAST
Nobel prizes are often granted to winning work decades later but Fredholm said the selection of Mello and Fire was due to the clear importance of their findings.
"Sometimes it is immediately apparent to the Nobel committee that a discovery is a really fundamental one," he said.
He cited 1962 Nobel Laureates James Watson and Francis Crick, who won their prize just nine years after discovering the structure of DNA, the fundamental building block of life.
Mello, who developed a fascination with the origins of life digging for dinosaur bones in the western United States with his palaeontologist father, said he had suspected the work might win a prize but not for another 10 or 20 years.
"It's amazing. It just hasn't sunk in yet," he said from his Massachusetts home.
Fire told Reuters the call from Stockholm was a surprise.
"There are dreams and there are wrong numbers and both were more likely," he said in a telephone interview, adding that "the recognition is most appreciated."
Fire earned his Ph.D. in biology in 1983 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now a professor of pathology and genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Mello has a Harvard doctorate and is a professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
The Massachusetts school said a number of firms — Novartis AG, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Monsanto Co., GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer — had licensed RNAi for their research.
San Francisco-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. has used RNAi to block a gene involved in cholesterol metabolism, for example, and this week won a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to use the technology against H5N1 avian influenza.
