Yoshinori Ohsumi wins Medicine Nobel Prize

Abstract

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi, 71, a cell biologist at Tokyo Institute of Technology “for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy.” Autophagy is the process by which cells capture large dysfunctional proteins, aging organelles, and invading pathogens in vesicles and then send them to the lysosome for degradation, said Juleen Zierath, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, in announcing the nearly $1 million prize. “Without autophagy, our cells won’t survive.” Dysfunction of the autophagy process is life-threatening from birth through old age. For example, autophagy is disrupted in Alzheimer’s disease, when toxic protein aggregates are not properly discarded. As a consequence, drugmakers have continued to eye the pathway as a therapeutic target. Although researchers had known since the 1960s that cells cleaned up their large cellular garbage by enclosing it in vesicle sacks and sending it to the