William Kaelin

William Kaelin shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on the VHL tumor suppressor and oxygen-sensing pathways, contributing fundamentally to the synthetic lethality concept in cancer biology. His laboratory has contributed to understanding how VHL loss creates synthetic lethal vulnerabilities in renal cell carcinoma and other tumors. More recently he has worked on MTAP-deleted tumors and their MAT2A dependency as a synthetic lethal target present in approximately 15% of all cancers. His foundational work continues to inspire new synthetic lethality-based therapeutic strategies.