Three Americans share Nobel Prize for Medicine

Assam · October 5, 2009

(Assams.Info) – This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine went to three American scientists who discovered the enzyme telomerase. Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak found that an enzyme called telomerase may play a role in the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells. It means their discovery could lead to new cancer treatments.

Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

Blackburn is a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Greider is a professor in the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Szostak is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. Their work, done in the late 1970s and 1980s, set the stage for research suggesting that cancer cells use telomerase to sustain their uncontrolled growth. Now scientists are studying whether use of drugs that block the enzyme can fight the deadly disease.

The trio were awarded the prize for the discovery of “how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase,” the Nobel jury made the announcement at a press conference at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

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