William Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza were jointly awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Medicine for their pioneering work into how human cells respond to evolving levels of oxygen.
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In announcing the award at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute on Monday, the Nobel Committee said the trio's results paved the way for "promising new approaches to combat anaemia, leukemia and many other diseases."
The Committee added that in response to varying levels of oxygen, the 2019 medicine laureates have identified molecular machinery that regulates gene activity, CNN reported.
The value of oxygen was recognized for a long time, the committee explained, but it remained unclear how cells adapt to changes in their levels.
Randall Johnson, member of the award committee, described the work of the trio as a "textbook discovery."
"This is something basic biology students will think about when they're learning science, at age 12 or 13, or younger, to learn the basic ways cells work. It's a basic aspect of how a cell functions, and it's a very exciting thing from that point of view alone."
The winners
New York-born Kaelin set up his own research laboratory at the Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and in 2002 became a full professor at the Harvard Medical School.
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Semenza, also born in New York, became a full-time professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1999 and has been the Vascular Research Program Director at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering since 2003.
Ratcliffe, who was born in Lancashire, England, studied medicine at Cambridge University and established an independent research group at Oxford University, becoming a full professor in 1996.
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