Cancer cell pioneers share Nobel medicine prize
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Updated: 2007-10-09 00:09

Cancer cell pioneers Leland Hartwell of the United States and Britons Tim Hunt and Paul Nurse won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday.

They share the prestigious $1 million award for groundbreaking research that could help find a cure for cancer, still one of the biggest killers in the developed world, Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement.

The billions of cells that make up every human being must grow and divide to replace worn out cells. Normally this process is steady and controlled, but cancer results when a renegade cell starts to grow and divide out of control.

Hartwell, Hunt and Nurse made breakthroughs in understanding how cells control their division, a stepping stone to finding out why some go haywire and turn into deadly tumours.

"This is the basic information on how cells divide + vital information for future treatment of most sorts of cancer," Karolinska Insitute professor and cancer expert Ulrik Ringborg told a news conference.

Hartwell discovered a class of genes that oversees the cell cycle. Hunt worked on special molecules that work like an engine for cell division, and he shed light on proteins that act as a gearbox to control the speed of growth.

"This is a fundamental discovery + important for anything that grows," said Anders Zetterberg, a professor at Stockholm's Karolinska hospital.

Hartwell, born in 1939, works at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Hunt, born in 1943, and Nurse, born in 1949, built on Hartwell's findings in their later work at London's Imperial Cancer Research Fund.

PREVENTING CANCER

"This information will be helpful in preventing as well as treating cancer," Nobel Assembly Chairwoman Anita Aperja told the news conference.

To divide correctly, cells need to perform a complex and delicate cascade of chemical reactions that in humans takes about a day.

The phases have to be performed in the right order, otherwise genes that form the blueprint for the new cell can get lost, rearranged or mixed up. That causes cancer.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Hartwell tinkered with yeast cells + the same kind as those used to make bread + and identified more than 100 genes that controlled their growth.

He also used irradiation to study what happens when cells realise something has gone wrong and pull the plug on their reproduction in time to prevent cancer.

Nurse started with a different kind of yeast, and in 1987 found a human gene containing instructions to make a protein called CDK, a building block for cell division.

Hunt investigated growth in cells from sea urchins, which are less complex than human cells. He discovered another class of proteins called cyclins, which control how fast CDK operates.

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