Jakob Herz prize winner Sir Peter Ratcliffe receives Nobel Prize for Medicine

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Prof. Sir Peter Ratcliffe (centre) at the award ceremony for the Jakob Herz Prize on 2 February 2013 in Erlangen with Prof. Jürgen Schüttler (left) and Prof. Dieter Grüske (right) (image: Rainer Windhorst).

Jakob Herz prize winner Sir Peter Ratcliffe receives Nobel Prize for Medicine

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe,William G. Kaelin Jr. and Gregg L. Semenza. They were awarded the prize for their ‘discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability’.

In conjunction with Forschungsstiftung Medizin at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, the Faculty of Medicine at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg awarded the Jakob Herz Prize to Sir Peter Ratcliffe in 2013 for his work in the excellent bilateral research cooperation with Universitätsklinikum Erlangen.

Professor Sir Peter Ratcliffe was born in Lancashire in 1954. He studied medicine at Cambridge and gained his doctorate (MD) in 1987 with a thesis about ischaemic and non-ischaemic factors in acute kidney failure. After training as an internist and nephrologist in various hospitals in London and Oxford, he was appointed Professor of Renal Medicine at Oxford University in 1996. He has been a Nuffield Professor and Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at Oxford since 2004.

With his working group, Peter Ratcliffe has made a significant contribution to the discovery and exploration of the ubiquitous cellular oxygen mechanism with which cells record changes in the availability of oxygen and control the transcription of a range of so-called hypoxia-induced genes. This will form the basis for new treatments for tumours and cardiovascular disorders that have been the subject of intensive research during the last 10 to 15 years in Erlangen at the Department of Medicine 4 – Nephrology and Hypertension and at the Institute of Pathology and in a further 10 working groups in friendly and very effective collaboration with Peter Ratcliffe and his laboratory in Oxford. The collaboration has led to more than 20 joint publications in renowned journals such as Nature Communications, Nature Genetics and Blood.

Further information as well as the commemorative publication for the 2013 Jakob Herz Prize is available on the Faculty of Medicine’s website.