Previous view: As the annual Nobel Prize is coming soon, the world’s attention will once again focus on Stockholm. Everyone in the academic community is concerned about who’s going to be the winner. According to our own understanding, we today would like to share with you the prediction of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
This section of Nobel Prize consists of two parts, physiology (refers to the fundamentals) and medicine (refers to the applications). At the beginning, many award winning programs were medicine-related, but now physiology takes the main position by a ratio of eight to two.
Medicine—the Applications
Although the fundamentals are promising, it also has the tendency to award clinical applications. That’s summarize the hot areas.
1. Imaging
Imaging has been awarded twice by now, CT and NMR respectively. This marked the transition of Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine from surgical procedures to imaging. No greater breakthroughs have been made than these two technologies, but some techniques are possible to share the Prize, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) by Seiji Ogawa and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) by David Edmund Kuhl.
2. Pharmaceutics
Since dopamine was awarded in 2000, no achievements in pharmaceutics have been made in winning the Nobel Prize. The basic reason may be that the value of these drugs can never be compared to that of the original drugs like penicillin and streptomycin. Even though, the development and application of some new drugs is worth the award, cholesterol-lowering drug statins (Akira Endo), for instance. While taking the common situation into consideration that no one has taken the Prize alone since 2001 except for IVF (2010), this award is possible to be shared.
Among all these new drugs and techniques , the maximum share content may be targeted cancer therapy. Impersonally, although targeted cancer therapy has made some achievements, its theoretical and practical value still exist uncertainties. Moreover, many people have made certain contributions to this field, such as Brian Druker and Axel Ullrich who found small-molecule inhibitors and Dennis Slamon who invented monoclonal antibody herceptin. Another hot topic is the monoclonal antibody of tumor immune checkpoints by James P. Allison. James P. Allison was just awarded this year’s Lasker Award for Clinical Medical a few days ago.
Chemistry
Biochemistry and biophysics, the basis of life science, are sometimes classified to the chemical field. They are the biggest winners of the Chemistry Prize in 21st century.
During the last fourteen years, eight years of the prize were given to the life science related projects, NMR and mass spectrometry of 2002, ion channels and water channels of 2003, ubiquitination of 2004, transcriptional mechanism of 2006, green fluorescent protein of 2008, translation mechanism of 2009, G protein-coupled receptors of 2012, 14 years microscope and so on, so there are also predict a possible way of life Prize in Chemistry.
Of course, there are many other projects that are possible to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They all made contributions to the rapid development of science or have improved people’s living standard to some extent.