Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi


Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi for work on ‘cell recycling’


Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering and elucidating a key mechanism in our body's defense system that involves degrading and recycling cellular components. Known as autophagy, this process plays an important role in cancer, Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, and numerous other devastating diseases.

 In making the announcement Monday morning, the prize committee in Stockholm said the work involves a series of "brilliant experiments" in the 1990s involving baker's yeast that have helped explain how a cell, the smallest unit of life, adapts in response to stressors like starvation and infection. In studying thousands of yeast mutants, Ohsumi -- an emeritus professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology -- identified 15 genes essential for autophagy. It turned out that virtually identical mechanisms exist in humans as well.

 "His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection," they wrote. "Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease."

 Autophagy helps remove damaged proteins and organelles and when it fails that can lead to cell aging and diseases of aging. On the flip side, "too much" autophagy can promote growth of tumor cells in cancer and resistance to treatments.

 The Nobel committee noted that "autophagy has been known for over 50 years." However, its fundamental importance in physiology and medicine "was only recognized after Yoshinori Ohsumi's paradigm-shifting research."

 Last year's award went to a trio of scientists for their work in parasitic diseases. William Campbell of the United States and Satoshi Omura of Japan helped develop a treatment that led to sharp decline in river blindness and China's Youyou Tu discovered the malaria drug artemisinin. In 2014, the award in medicine went to scientists John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edward I. Moser for deciphering the mechanism in the brain that allows us to find our way around. O'Keefe holds both U.S. and British citizenship and the Mosers, a husband-and-wife team, are from Norway.

 The award, established 115 years ago by industrialist Alfred Nobel, comes with a prize worth 8 million Swedish krona or about $937,000.









source: The Washington post
Location: United States

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