Fire and Mello win Nobel Prize for 'gene silencing'

Groundbreaking discovery of a way to silence specific genes that will lead to new treatments against cancer, genetic disorders and viral diseases helped two American geneticists to win consolidate $1.4 million prize and laurels of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Andrew Z. Fire, 47, a former Cambridge post-doc now at Stanford University, and Craig C. Mello, 45, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, won the laurels on Monday for discovering RNA (ribonucleic acid) interference (RNAi), a revolutionary finding that scientists believe will lead to treat dreadful illnesses like cancer, heart disease and AIDS.

Fire in cooperation with his fellow geneticist Mello, discovered in 1998 that double-stranded RNA is very effective at ‘interference’, i.e. at blocking protein synthesis. According to Fire, RNAi not only takes place in tiny worms called C. elegans, that Fire has used in his study rather it happens outside the laboratory too. It has been shown to be a well-preserved evolutionary mechanism that plays a key role in the natural development of all fungi, flora and fauna, and that is, for instance, of huge importance in an organism's defence against viral infection.

In RNAi, which occurs in plants, animals and people, certain molecules spark the destruction or inactivation of the messenger RNA from a specific gene, so that no protein is produced, thus the gene is silenced, efficaciously.

"This has been such a revolution in biomedicine, everybody is using it," said Thomas Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for which Mello is an investigator. "It's so important that people almost take it for granted already, even though it was discovered fairly recently," said Cech, who won a Nobel in 1989 for RNA research.

Since, US pair’s discovery was published in the journal Nature in 1998, many tests were being performed to check if the technique could be used to treat serious medical conditions, including Huntingdon's, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and age-related macular degeneration, a major cause of blindness.

Fire and Mello are lucky enough to get the fruit so early for their research, just eight years after the research was first published otherwise, nobel prizes are generally awarded decades after the work that they honour.

The Nobel committee at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said the two had "discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information".

Several companies have started to design therapies that take advantage of RNAi.

For instance, Acuity Pharmaceuticals of Philadelphia has completed efficacy tests of an RNAi that puts off a gene accountable for new blood-vessel growth. Another, Sirna Therapeutics of San Francisco has completed safety studies for macular degeneration and is developing RNAi against the hepatitis C virus. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Mass., has been studying an RNAi against the respiratory syncytial virus, which is specifically deadly in infants.

Monday's laurel was the first Nobel prize of the year 2006, to be followed by the awards for physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.