Japanese cell biologist awarded Nobel Prize for work on autophagy

Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi has won this year's Nobel prize in medicine for his work on 'self-eating' cells.
He figured out how cells degrade and essentially take out the trash.
Barry Welsh reports.
The Japanese cell biologist received the award for his research on how cells operate to "detoxify" themselves. Yoshinori Ohsumi's work on cell breakdown, a field known as autophagy, is important because it can help explain what goes wrong in a variety of diseases.

Autophagy, derived from Greek words that basically mean "self-eating" is how the body recycles unwanted or unneeded cells. These unneeded cells are located in the body and their useful elements are recycled to generate energy or create new cells. It's a very important process that prevents cancerous growths from forming, maintains a healthy metabolism and can also protect against diabetes.

Ohsumi's research concerns how cells break down and recycle their content. And disruptions in this recycling process have been linked to diseases like cancer, Parkinson's and type 2 diabetes.


"The discoveries made by Yoshinori Ohsumi have been instrumental in revealing the mechanism and significance of a fundamental physiological process and there is growing hope that this knowledge will lead to the development of new strategies for the treatment of many human diseases."

Ohsumi was awarded a prize of 8 million Swedish crowns, or roughly 933,000 US dollars, and he told Japanese media that he was extremely honored.


"In recent years I've unexpectedly received many awards, but the weight of the Nobel prize is on another level."

The Japanese cell biologist was born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, and has been a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009.

The prize for Physiology or Medicine is the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.
Barry Welsh, Arirang news.