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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to three scientists — William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza — for their work on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability. The Nobel Assembly announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday. (Specia and Wolgelenter, 10/7)

The fundamental discoveries by the trio illuminated what the Nobel committee called “one of life’s most essential adaptive processes” — how cells detect and respond to changes in oxygen levels, which is necessary for life and used to convert food into energy. Their work helps explain how, at high altitudes, the body adapts to thinner air by sending signals to generate more red blood cells to carry oxygen. (Johnson, 10/7)

Oxygen sensing plays a key role in a large number of diseases. “The discoveries made by this year’s Nobel Prize laureates have fundamental importance for physiology and have paved the way for promising new strategies to fight anaemia, cancer and many other diseases,” the Nobel Prize committee said. Last year’s prize was shared by James P. Allison, professor at the University of Texas and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, Japan, for discoveries that led to a new cancer therapy that uses the body’s immune system to attack tumors. (Chopping and Sugden, 10/7)

In work that spanned more than two decades, the researchers teased apart different aspects of how cells in the body first sense and then respond to low oxygen, a gas that is crucial for converting food into useful energy. When the amount of oxygen available to cells drops, levels of a protein complex named HIF rise. This ramps up the activity of a gene used in the production of erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone that in turn boosts the creation of red blood cells. (Sample, 10/7)

New York-born Kaelin established his own research laboratory at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and became a full professor at Harvard Medical School in 2002. Semenza, also born in New York, became a full-time professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1999 and since 2003 has been the Director of the Vascular Research Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering. Ratcliffe, who was born in Lancashire, England, studied medicine at Cambridge University and established an independent research group at Oxford University, becoming a full professor in 1996. (Lewis, 10/7)

Nobel glory this year comes with a 9-million kronor ($918,000) cash award, a gold medal and a diploma. The laureates receive them at elegant ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10 — the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896. (Olsen, Cheng and Keyton, 10/7)

Though the prizes in the scientific field always go to basic researchers, scientists have won the Nobel Prize for some obviously translatable discoveries. Some have won for discovering specific treatments, like penicillin and artemisinin and insulin. ... But building a bona-fide biotech company around a single, specific Nobel Prize-winning discovery is still — necessarily — statistically rare. Companies that can emphasize that connection always do, both to their backers and their employees. (Sheridan, 10/7)