Medicine nobel for ohsumi
A Japanese scientist won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on autophagy — a process whereby cells “eat themselves”.
2012
Shinya Yamanaka (Japan) and John Gurdon (Britain) for discoveries showing how adult cells can be transformed back into stem cells
2013
Thomas C. Suedhof (US citizen born in Germany), James E. Rothman and Randy W. Schekman (US) for work on how the cell organises its transport system
2014
John O’Keefe (Britain, US), Edvard I. Moser and May-Britt Moser (Norway) for discovering how the brain navigates with an “inner GPS”
2015
William Campbell (US citizen born in Ireland) and Satoshi Omura (Japan), Tu Youyou (China) for unlocking treatments for malaria and roundworm
2016
Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his work on autophagy — a process whereby cells “eat themselves” — which when disrupted can cause Parkinson’s and diabetes.
Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions, including cancer and neurological disease.” Jury, Nobel prize
stockholm — Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for his pioneering work on autophagy — a process whereby cells ‘eat themselves’ — which when disrupted can cause Parkinson’s and diabetes.
A fundamental process in cell physiology, autophagy is essential for the orderly recycling of damaged cell parts and understanding it better has major implications for health and disease, including cancer.
Ohsumi’s discoveries “have led to a new paradigm in the understanding of how the cell recycles its contents,” the jury said.
“Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease,” the jury added.
Researchers first observed during the 1960s that the cell could destroy its own contents by wrapping them up in membranes and transporting them to a recycling compartment called the lysosome — a discovery that earned Belgian scientist Christian de Duve a Nobel Medicine Prize in 1974.
It was de Duve who coined the term “autophagy”, which comes from the Greek meaning self-eating. In what the jury described as a “series of brilliant experiments in the early 1990s”, Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy.
He then went on to explain the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and showed that similar sophisticated machinery is used in human cells.
Ohsumi’s findings opened the path to understanding the importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as how the body adapts to starvation or responds to infection. When autophagy breaks down, links have been established to Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes and other disorders that appear in the elderly.
Intense research is now underway to develop drugs that target autophagy in various diseases.
Ohsumi, 71, received a PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1974. He is currently a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
He is the 23rd Japanese national to win a Nobel prize, and the 6th Japanese medicine laureate.
The prize comes with eight million Swedish kronor (around $936,000 or 834,000 euros).
“This is the highest honour for a researcher,” Ohsumi told Japan’s
My motto is to do what others don’t want to do. I thought (cellular breakdown) was very interesting. This is where it all begins. Yoshinori Ohsumi
public broadcaster NHK.
“My motto is to do what others don’t want to do. I thought (cellular breakdown) was very interesting. This is where it all begins.
It didn’t draw much attention in the past, but we’re now in a time when there a bigger focus on it,” added Ohsumi.
The medicine prize is awarded by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, which has seen its reputation tarnished over a recent scandal involving Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini.
In 2011, while working as a visiting professor at Karolinska, Macchiarini soared to fame for inserting the first synthetic trachea, or windpipe, using patients’ stem cells.
His work was initially hailed as a game-changer for transplant medicine. But two patients died and a third was left severely ill.
Allegations ensued that the risky procedure had been carried out on at least one individual who had not, at the time, been critically ill, and in 2014 several surgeons at Karolinska filed a complaint alleging that Macchiarini had downplayed the risks of the procedure.
Karolinska suspended all synthetic trachea transplants shortly after. Two members of the Nobel medicine prize assembly were forced to step down in September over the scandal.
The 2016 Nobel season is to continue Tuesday with the physics prize announcement, followed by the chemistry prize on Wednesday.