Canada's most prestigious bio-medical awards continued their remarkable track record in predicting Nobel Prize winners yesterday when a pair of 2005 Gairdner Foundation recipients were named this year's Nobel laureates in medicine,

American geneticists Craig Mello and Dr. Andrew Fire, who each won the $30,000 Canadian prize last year for their groundbreaking work in silencing genes, will split the $1.4 million (U.S.) Nobel award in Stockholm Dec. 10.

It's the 67th time in the Gairdner's 47-year history that winners have gone on to collect Nobel prizes in either medicine or chemistry.

"I don't know of any other prize in Canada of any kind that has this kind of inter-linkage to the Nobel Prize," said Dr. John Dirks, president of the Gairdner Foundation, an international award program for outstanding biomedical research.

"Our record over the last number of years is as good as anybody's. I don't know of any better."

Of 11 Nobel winners in medicine over the past five years, nine had previously won the Gairdner, Dirks said. There are typically between five and eight Gairdners awarded each year.

"We hit the jackpot (again)," said Peter Lewis, vice-dean of research at the University of Toronto's medical school and co-chair of the Gairdner's award selection committee.
Mello and Fire won both awards for work in uncovering a potent way to turn off the effect of specific genes, opening a new avenue for disease treatment and genetic studies, Lewis said.

RNA (ribonucleic acid) interference is already being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes, and it is being studied as a treatment for infections such as the AIDS and hepatitis viruses and for other conditions, including heart disease and cancer, Associate Press reports.
Basically, Lewis said, the pair discovered a way to turn off gene function, often by destroying the RNA messengers that take the coded information from a gene out into the cell's protein production areas.

It is the proteins produced through this genetic coding that allow all biological growth and function to occur. So destroying the messenger RNA, through small, targeting chemicals, effectively silences the gene.

"Basically this is a mechanism that we didn't know existed so they were discoverers of something that was totally brand new," Lewis said. "That's why they're getting the Nobel Prize such a short time after they made their initial discovery. It's quite unusual."

Fire, 47, of Stanford University, and Mello, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, published their seminal work in 1998.

"This was a real sea change in our understanding of how genes work and how they're regulated," Dirks told the Star.

"These small, double stranded RNA can silence the activity in genes and the total consequences of that are not yet quit clear."

RNA interference occurs naturally in plants, animals, and humans. The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which awarded the prize, said it is important for regulating the activity of genes and helps defend against viral infection.

"This year's Nobel laureates have discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information," the institute said.

Erna Moller, a Nobel committee member, said the pair's research helped shed new light on a complicated process that had confused researchers for years. "It was like opening the blinds in the morning," she told AP. "Suddenly you can see everything clearly."

Lewis said the "jury is still out" on how successful gene silencing will be in terms of therapeutic usages. But a gene causing high blood cholesterol levels was recently shown to be silenced in animals through RNA interference.

Lewis said the technique is already proving invaluable in genetic research, where its ability to shut it down can tell scientists much about the specific function of a gene.

Mello, 45, said his father's work at Washington's Smithsonian Institution on dinosaurs sparked his fascination with the ancient history of the human condition, Reuters reports.

"I would go to the Smithsonian and see my dad's office back behind the dinosaur bones, get to go in there and see the dinosaurs spread out over the table," Mello told a news conference."I wanted to be a scientist mainly because I just found the whole human condition and the fact that we are here and where we came from fascinating."

Fire told Reuters the call from the Nobel committee surprised him. "There are dreams and there are wrong numbers, and both were more likely," he said. "The recognition is most appreciated."

Dirks said a secret vote built into the Gairdner's selection process, which enlists top Canadian and international advisers, helps ensure good science - rather than politics - carries the day.

"I think it's the nature of the process that is key," he said.

"But we don't go into giving people prizes saying, `Let's pick those we think will win the Nobel Prize.' We just try to pick the best people in our minds and it just happens to have this other dividend."