Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi has won the 2016 Nobel Prize for medicine for ground-breaking experiments with yeast which exposed a key mechanism in the body’s defenses where cells degrade and recycle their components.
The process called autophagy- derived from Greek words “auto” meaning self and “phagein” meaning eat allows cells to destroy their own guts and essentially recycle them.
Understanding the process has led to apprehension of diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s and type 2 diabetes, the prize committee said in its statement on Monday
According to Nobelprize.org, this concept emerged during the 1960’s, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sack-like vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation
Ohsumi, born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, has been a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009. He told Kyodo News agency he was “extremely honored” to get the prize.
