2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Fire and Mello for Discovery of RNA interference in the nematode C. elegans
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| Andy Fire |
Craig Mello |
In 1998, Andrew Fire, Craig Mello and their coworkers discovered that double-stranded RNA injected into a worm could cause the specific destruction of the normal mRNA from the gene with the same sequence - thus 'silencing' the gene's function. This process came to called "RNA interference," or "RNAi". This technique allowed researchers to powerfully block the function of a specific gene in the model organism C. elegans. Researchers soon discovered that RNAi could block gene function in other organisms, from plants to humans. In fact, the phenomenon had been discovered earlier in plants, but the generality of RNAi had not been recognized. Now it became obvious that RNAi would not only be a powerful technique for researchers to study the function of genes, but that RNAi would likely become an important tool in the treatment of disease. In this case, the medical application of RNAi has progressed quite rapidly: the first clinical trials of an RNAi-based therapy were begun in 2004 to treat age-related macular degeneration, a condition that causes blindness.
The Key Paper - Fire et al., 1998 - "Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans" by Andrew Fire, SiQun Xu, Mary K. Montgomery, Steven A. Kostas, Samuel E. Driver & Craig C. Mello. Nature 319: 806-811.
For more information:
Fire:
Press Release from Stanford University.
Profile of Dr. Fire at the Stanford University School of Medicine
Andy Fire's Lab Home Page at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.
Mello:
Press Release from the University of Massachussets Medical School
Dr. Mello Research Profile
RNA interference-based medicine:
The first company to bring RNAi technology to clinical trials is siRNA Therapeutics.