The Nobel Prize for medicine for telomere biology and relevance to heart failure research.

摘要

On 5 October 2009, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute announced that they had decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009 jointly to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase'. These discoveries had a major impact in the field of cellular biology, especially in the field of the ageing process and cancer research. In the present commentary, we aim to put this discovery into a historical perspective and elaborate on its potential relevance for the clinical condition of chronic heart failure (CHF).