NEW YORK — Two Americans and a German-American won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for illuminating how tiny bubbles inside cells shuttle key substances around like a vast and highly efficient fleet of vans, delivering the right cargo to the right place at the right time.
Scientists believe the research eventually could lead to new medicines for epilepsy, diabetes and other metabolism deficiencies.
The work already has helped doctors diagnose a severe form of epilepsy and immune deficiency diseases in children. And it has helped guide research into the brain and many neurological diseases, and opened the door for biotech companies to make a yeast pump out large quantities of useful proteins like insulin.
The $1.2 million prize will be shared by James Rothman, 62, of Yale University, Randy Schekman, 64, of the University of California, and Dr. Thomas Sudhof, 57, of Stanford University.
They unlocked the mysteries of the cell’s internal transport system, which relies on bubble-like structures called vesicles to deliver substances the cell needs. The fleet of vesicles is sort of the FedEx of the cellular world.
When a pancreas cell releases insulin or one brain cell sends out a chemical messenger to talk to a neighboring one, for example, the vesicles have to deliver those substances to the right places on the cell surface. They also ferry cargo between different parts of a cell.
“Imagine hundreds of thousands of people who are traveling around hundreds of miles of streets; how are they going to find the right way? Where will the bus stop and open its doors so that people can get out?” Nobel committee secretary Goran Hansson said. “There are similar problems in the cell.”
Jeremy Berg, former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in Bethesda, Md., said the prize was long overdue and widely expected because the work was “so fundamental and has driven so much other research.”
In the 1970s, Schekman discovered a set of genes that were required for vesicle transport.
Rothman revealed in the 1980s and ’90s how vesicles delivered their cargo to the right places. Also in the ’90s, Sudhof, who was born in Germany but moved to the U.S. in 1983 and also has American citizenship, identified the machinery that controls when vesicles release chemical messengers from one brain cell that let it communicate with another.
Schekman said he was awakened at 1 a.m. at his home in California by the chairman of the prize committee, just as he was suffering from jetlag after returning from a trip to Germany the night before.
“I wasn’t thinking too straight. I didn’t have anything elegant to say,” he said. “All I could say was ‘Oh, my God,’ and that was that.”
What’s next
The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics will be announced Tuesday, and the chemistry award is set for Wednesday. The Swedish Academy will reveal its choice for the Nobel literature award Thursday, and a Norwegian committee will name the winner or winners of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. That award is always announced in Oslo, in line with the wishes of prize founder Alfred Nobel. The awards, worth $1.2 million, have been handed out since 1901 by committees in Stockholm and Oslo. This year’s Nobel season ends with the economics award Oct. 14. The Associated Press
