Unless an organization like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation receives this year's Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow, Tuesday's announcement that Gerhard Ertl won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry ends the annual run of science awards that began a little over three weeks ago with the announcement of the 2007 Lasker Awards.

Many recent years have seen the chemistry Nobel given for biochemical discoveries including the polymerase chain reaction, the molecular basis of transcription and the proteasome.

When he was asked whether he had ever imagined that he would receive the Nobel prize, a 2004 chemistry laureate answered with disarming honesty that he certainly had not imagined his prize would be in chemistry.

This year's chemistry prize, though, is related to biotech in only the most tangential ways. It was awarded to German scientist Ertl, on his 71st birthday, for "his thorough studies of fundamental molecular processes at the gas-solid interface."

If anything, Tuesday's physics prize had a greater impact on biotechnology. It honored quantum mechanical discoveries that are behind the huge increase in computer storage capacity over the past decade - an increase that has been critical for providing the sheer hard disk capacity necessary for many genomics projects.

But the prize for physiology or medicine, which was awarded Monday, is all the more at the heart of biotech. It went to Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for "their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells" - or in layman's terms, for the knockout mouse.

Given how ubiquitous the knockout technique has become, it is by turns comforting and sobering to hear of its tentative beginnings.

Capecchi told the Nobel Foundation interviewer that "our first grant was refused with respect to that project . . . mainly because [the reviewers] didn't think it was possible" that DNA recombination would work.

Thankfully, his group ultimately managed to convince reviewers that the scheme was not too harebrained to fund, and these days it's hard to imagine biotechnology without the knockout mouse. The animal is a mainstay of preclinical research, and the Nobel foundation said in its press release that "Gene targeting has now been used by so many research groups and in so many contexts that it is impossible to make a brief summary of the results."

And while most scientists will speak of potential practical applications when asked which direction they hope to see their discoveries take, the knockout mouse already is so practical that Capecchi, when asked the same question, spoke of using knockout technology to delve into more theoretical realms.

When asked, "Can we make this technology sophisticated enough to handle very complex questions?" he told the Nobel Foundation interviewer, "To utilize [the technology] to study more processes in evolution, and how different traits have come up during evolution, those are the kinds of questions we look forward to answering."

One of the best predictors of becoming a Nobelist is winning a Lasker Award. This year's Nobelists shared the 2001 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, and though he said that "of course" he was surprised to win, Martin Evans specifically cited his receipt of the Lasker Award when he acknowledged that he had known winning the Nobel Prize was a possibility.

If that trend holds up, Ralph Steinman could find himself in Stockholm accepting the Nobel in a few years. Steinman was awarded the 2007 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for his discovery of dendritic cells, which present antigens to T cells. In their announcement, the Lasker jury said Steinman "revolutionized our understanding of the events that instigate an immune response and unlocked the entire field of T-cell activation."

Besides discovering the cells, Steinman also worked out how to culture them in sufficient quantities to be clinically useful. And while dendritic cells are not as ubiquitous as knockout mice in biotechnology, a number of companies are working to bring them to the clinic.

Steinman is on the scientific advisory board of several biotechnology companies, including Durham, N.C.-based Argos Therapeutics. Argos is using RNA-loaded dendritic cell immunotherapy to combat both cancer and infectious diseases, and is in clinical trials for metastatic renal cell carcinoma, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and HIV.

Both cancer and HIV vaccines have proven recalcitrant to date. (See BioWorld Today, May 10, 2007, and July 19, 2007.)

But Argos Therapeutics Chief Scientific Officer Charles Nicolette is optimistic that dendritic cells - much like antibodies, which certainly looked dead more than once before they became a biotech success story - will ultimately live up to their promise and "will come into its own," he told BioWorld Today.

"When you look at the density of companies and products that are moving through the pipeline, it is clear that we're on a threshold," he noted.