Profiles of Leading Women Scientists on AcademiaNet.
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Photo: Paul Wilkinson
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 2019
Year of election: | 2020 |
Section: | Physiology and Pharmacology/Toxicology |
City: | Oxford |
Country: | Great Britain |
Research Priorities: Oxidation, oxygen homeostasis, tumour hypoxia
Peter J. Ratcliffe is a British nephrologist. He discovered how the cells of the human body sense and adapt to oxygen availability. This discovery has provided the basis for developing new strategies to combat anaemia, cancer, and other diseases. For his research, Peter J. Ratcliffe was honoured with the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Maintaining oxygen balance (oxygen homeostasis) is a key challenge for the body. Oxygen deficiency (hypoxia) is a major cause of many diseases. Oxygen availability affects, for example, the growth of cancer cells in certain cases.
Oxygen sensors of cells offer starting points for developing new therapies to treat cancer, anaemia, and lung and cardiovascular diseases. The reason being that in cancer, many of these signalling pathways are dysregulated by either an oncogenic mutation or microenvironmental hypoxia. Peter Ratcliffe's lab investigates the importance of these processes for disease development, particularly the effects of unphysiological switching of massively interconnected signalling pathways in cancer.
Peter Ratcliffe's researchers want to understand how these pathways' potentially anti-oncogenic components are adapted during cancer progression. Lineage marking and genetic and genomic strategies are being used to do so.