Johns Hopkins University celebrates Nobel laureate Gregg Semenza

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is celebrating one of its top researchers, Dr. Gregg Semenza, who shares this year's Nobel Prize for medicine for his work on how genes respond to low levels of oxygen. Semenza's dean, Paul B. Rothman, says his "groundbreaking basic research has been inspired largely by what he has seen in the clinic" at Hopkins. The university says that work has "far-reaching implications in understanding the impacts of low oxygen levels in blood disorders, blinding eye diseases, cancer, diabetes, coronary artery disease, and other conditions."

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Shared the award with two others

The 63-year-old Semenza shares the award with William G. Kaelin Jr., professor of medicine at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who did his specialist training in internal medicine and oncology at Johns Hopkins, and Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe, professor at Oxford University and at the Francis Crick Institute. Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels calls it a momentous day, and says they're immensely proud of Semenza's passion for discovery, an example of the school's commitment to creating new knowledge that helps make a better and more humane world.

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'How the body adapts to different levels of oxygen'

A member of the Nobel Committee at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet says this year’s award was given for “a fundamental basic science discovery about how the body adapts to different levels of oxygen.” Nils-Goran Larsson told The Associated Press that although we are surrounded by oxygen “we have to adapt to different oxygen levels — for instance, if we start living at higher altitude we have to adapt and get more red blood cells, more blood vessels, and also in different disease processes the regulation of oxygen and the metabolism is very important.” Larsson says “people with renal failure often get hormonal treatment for anaemia. With this discovery system, there are alternative ways of doing this and developing similar treatments.”

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Dr. Andrew Murray of the University of Cambridge says the three winners of the Nobel prize in medicine “revealed the elegant mechanisms by which our cells sense oxygen levels and respond to fluctuations. In a statement on Monday, Murray said that hypoxia — when the body doesn’t have enough oxygen — is a characteristic of numerous diseases including heart failure, chronic lung disease and many cancers. He said the work of Dr. William G. Kaelin Jr, Dr. Gregg Semenza and Dr. Peter Ratcliffe has “paved the way to greater understanding of these common, life-threatening conditions and new strategies to treat them.”

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