Biologists who decoded how cells sense oxygen win medicine Nobel

Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes given each year.

Two Americans and a Briton won the 2019 Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for discovering a molecular switch that regulates how cells adapt to fluctuating oxygen levels, opening up new approaches to treating heart failure, anaemia and cancer.

William Kaelin at the US Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School said he was overwhelmed to get a pre-dawn call to say he and two other doctors, Gregg Semenza of Johns Hopkins University and Peter Ratcliffe of Oxford University, had won the 9-million Swedish-crown ($913,000) prize.

"I don't usually get phone calls at 5 am, but I knew this was 'Nobel