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MAIN | PEACE | CHEMISTRY | ECONOMICS | LITERATURE | PHYSICS
NOTES | OVERVIEW | LAUREATE LOCATOR
Cardiovascular discovery carries potent news
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(CNN) -- The Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine went this year to three U.S. scientists whose discovery helped pave the way for the wildly popular anti-impotence drug Viagra.
The $978,000 prize, awarded by Sweden's Karolinska Institute, is to be divided equally among Robert Furchgott of the State University of New York in Brooklyn; Louis Ignarro of the University of California-Los Angeles; and Ferid Murad of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.
Through collective research efforts, the trio discovered that the body uses nitric oxide -- a colorless gas long believed to be just a common air pollutant -- to regulate blood vessels.
How the discovery was made
In 1977, Murad, a Houston medical doctor and pharmacologist, discovered that nitroglycerin and other related compounds that dilate blood vessels release nitric oxide. The nitric oxide, or NO, relaxes smooth muscle cells, he found.
Furchgott, meanwhile, was busy researching the effects of drugs on blood vessels -- but with contradictory results.
The New York pharmacologist found that a drug sometimes would cause blood vessels to contract and at other times to dilate.
He began to wonder if the condition of the surface cells inside the blood vessels -- specifically, whether they were intact or damaged -- could be giving him the varying results.
In 1980, Furchgott demonstrated that acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, dilated blood vessels only if the surface cells were intact.
He concluded the surface cells -- also known as endothelial cells -- produced an unknown signal molecule that in turn made vascular smooth muscle cells relax.
Furchgott named his find EDRF -- the endothelium-derived relaxing factor. Then the quest began to identify the mysterious EDRF.
Furchgott and Los Angeles-based pharmacologist Ignarro then set out to identify EDRF's chemical makeup.
Working independently and sometimes jointly with Furchgott, Ignarro in 1986 found that EDRF was, in fact, NO.
At a conference that July, Furchgott and Ignarro unveiled their discovery, which "elicited an avalanche of research activities in many different laboratories around the world," the Nobel committee said in October in announcing the prize.
"This was the first discovery that a gas can act as a signal molecule in the organism," the committee said.
And what about Viagra?
Just as it took years to discover that nitric oxide tells blood vessels to relax or widen, it will likely be years before the full medical benefits will be derived from the prizewinning trio's discovery.
NO gas is already being given to some infants to reduce dangerously high blood pressure in lungs. NO is also being used to help diagnose some inflammatory diseases, such as asthma or colitis.
And then there's Viagra.
A spokeswoman for Viagra manufacturer Pfizer Inc. said the work of Murad, Furchgott and Ignarro was "a small piece of information" that researchers used in creating the now famous anti-impotence drug.
But for that small piece of information, Viagra might not be on the market today.
The drug is designed to increase the effect of nitric oxide. It can help trigger an erection of the penis the same way it works on blood vessels, because the relaxation of the vessels' smooth muscles lets blood flow in.
So what does the future hold?
Research is already under way to create more powerful and selective cardiac drugs and to create drugs that work as NO inhibitors, which would be useful in treating shock patients.
Cancer researchers are also studying NO to test whether it could stop the growth of tumors.
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