The No­bel Prize for Med­i­cine was award­ed to William Kaelin, Pe­ter Rat­cliffe and Gregg Se­men­za for a dis­cov­ery on how cells re­spond to oxy­gen that could have a wide-rang­ing im­pact on treat­ments for ane­mia and can­cer, among oth­er ail­ments.

The re­searchers earned No­bel sta­tus for their iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the HIF, or hy­pox­ia-in­duc­ing fac­tor, pro­tein that con­trols how the body re­sponds and adapts to oxy­gen lev­els, and a host of re­lat­ed dis­cov­er­ies. The find­ings have yet to pro­duce ac­tion­able ther­a­pies, but HIF has been shown to im­pact tu­mor pro­duc­tion — help­ing can­cer cells com­pen­sate for an oxy­gen-low en­vi­ron­ment — and red blood cells.

“This is such a fun­da­men­tal el­e­ment of how our cells deal with get­ting oxy­gen and adapt­ing to its use,” No­bel Com­mit­tee Mem­ber Ran­dall John­son told re­porters. “One could al­most imag­ine the im­pli­ca­tions will be — I don’t want to say end­less — but very, very wide.”

Com­pared to last year — when James Al­li­son and Tasuku Hon­jo won for pi­o­neer­ing can­cer im­munother­a­pies that have al­ready been used to treat thou­sands of pa­tients – this year’s’ work feels aca­d­e­m­ic in its im­pact to-date on med­i­cine and phar­ma­col­o­gy. But it comes from win­ners who have pushed back on trans­lata­bil­i­ty as a coun­ter­pro­duc­tive met­ric for re­search.

“Lack of knowl­edge is the true bot­tle­neck to clin­i­cal trans­la­tion,” Kaelin wrote af­ter the trio won the Lasker Awards in 2016, in a Na­ture col­umn dug up by The Guardian’s Nico­la Davis. “We must re­turn to more care­ful ex­am­i­na­tion of re­search pa­pers for orig­i­nal­i­ty, ex­per­i­men­tal de­sign and da­ta qual­i­ty, and adopt more hu­mil­i­ty about pre­dict­ing im­pact, which can tru­ly be known on­ly in ret­ro­spect (trans­for­ma­tive dis­cov­er­ies such as re­stric­tion en­zymes, yeast cell-cy­cle mu­tants and CRISPR–Cas9 were once con­sid­ered sim­ply odd­i­ties of na­ture).”

A clin­i­cal tri­al in Chi­na will soon be­gin lever­ag­ing their work to treat ane­mia, John­son said. Oth­er re­searchers are work­ing on us­ing it in on­col­o­gy, with HIF’s over­ac­tiv­i­ty in tu­mors mak­ing it a key dif­fer­en­tia­tor be­tween can­cer and nor­mal cells.