Sharing the Nobel Prize

A trio of winners pioneered research into prostaglandins

When Swedish Chemist Sune Bergstroem started to do research on prostaglandin in 1947, almost nothing was known about the hormone-like substance, which had been discovered barely a decade earlier by his compatriot, Ulf S. von Euler. Even the name of the substance was based on the false assumption that it originates in the prostate gland. Over the next 35 years, with Bergstroem leading the way, researchers discovered that prostaglandin (PG) is not one chemical but a whole family of substances found in almost every tissue of the body. PGS, it was learned, are extraordinarily versatile and play a variety of roles in maintaining normal blood pressure and temperature, and in protecting organs from damage caused by disease, traumatic injury and stress.

Bergstroem's explorations of this virgin territory earned him the sobriquet "father of prostaglandin chemistry" and last week an even greater honor, the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The 66-year-old Swede shared the award and $157,500 with two other pioneers of PG research: Bengt Samuelsson, 48, a former student of Bergstroem's and his colleague at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, and British Pharmacologist John Vane, 55, of Wellcome Research Laboratories in Beckenham, England. All three received the news in Boston, where they were helping to celebrate Harvard Medical School's bicentennial. All three professed surprise at the early-morning call from Stockholm. Though Bergstrom is chairman of the Nobel Foundation, the post is largely administrative and plays no part in the selection of prizewinners.

Bergstroem's groundbreaking discovery was that PGs are manufactured in the body from polyunsaturated fatty acids, nutrients that are found in meat and vegetable oil. More than a dozen PGs have been isolated by the three Nobel winners as well as by other researchers. PGs often work in antagonistic pairs. One, for example, lowers blood pressure, while another raises it. One dilates bronchial tubes, a second constricts them. One promotes the inflammatory process, another inhibits it. A type called thromboxanes, discovered in platelets by Samuelsson in 1973, helps blood to clot; prostacyclin, a PG identified by Vane in 1976, is the most powerful natural inhibitor of clotting.

Some physical disorders appear to be linked to an imbalance of prostaglandins. Too little of a type that regulates gastric acid and protects the stomach lining has a role in the development of ulcers. Too much of a PG that causes uterine contraction may provoke menstrual cramps. Other PGs play a part in arthritis, while leukotrienes, PG-related compounds identified by Samuelsson, are implicated in asthma.

The direct use of both prostaglandins and substances that block PG formation looms as important medical therapy. PGS have been used to treat ulcers and circulatory disturbances and to soften the cervix and stimulate labor for births and abortions. Compounds that block PG formation have been used to relieve pain caused by gallstones and menstruation. In fact, the most common pain reliever of all, aspirin, produces its effect by blocking the synthesis of certain prostaglandins, a discovery made by Vane in 1971 that helped resolve the longstanding mystery of how aspirin works.

"In the next 20 years we should see a substantial attack on the disease process," says Vane of future PG research. "We will be able to find new drugs that have effects on cardiovascular disease, on asthma, on heart attack." And even, he predicts, on many of the ills associated with aging. .

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