Two Americans won the Nobel chemistry prize Wednesday for studies of molecular channels in cells that could lead to better treatment of disorders of muscles, including the heart, and other ailments.
The prize went to Roderick MacKinnon, 47, a biophysicist and self-taught X-ray crystallographer at Rockefeller University in Manhattan, and Peter Agre, 54, a professor of biological chemistry and medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The researchers will share the $1.3 million prize.
The two were honored for studies of channels in the membrane of cells that allow water molecules and electrically charged atoms called ions to pass through. Experts said the work opens the door to further research on disorders in which the channels fail to operate properly, including diseases of the nervous system and muscles such as the heart.
MacKinnon did some of his work at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he used a bright X-ray at the National Synchrotron Light Source to probe the structure of crystallized proteins from the potassium ion channel.
With a better knowledge of what the channels look like, specialists said, researchers can pursue new and more effective drugs to alter their behavior.
“I’m jubilant,” Agre told Reuters after learning that he had won. “I’m overwhelmed, frankly. One doesn’t plan to have this sort of thing happen.”
MacKinnon, who was at his summer home on Cape Cod, Mass., when the prize was announced, said, “I didn’t believe it.”
Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, said MacKinnon had solved “one of the toughest problems in biology” by showing the structure of the ion channel at the atomic level.
Even before MacKinnon and his colleagues showed the structure of a particular ion channel, drugs aimed at such channels had been developed. Calcium channel blockers, for example, are used to treat chest pain, high blood pressure and abnormal heart rhythms.
