The Nobel Prize for Medicine rewarded the Japanese Yoshinori Ohsumi on Monday for his discoveries on the “recycling plant” of our cells which, in the event of dysfunction, can trigger Parkinson’s disease or diabetes.
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Mr. Ohsumi, 71, spent most of his career as a biologist at the University of Tokyo, where his experiences on the autophagy process provided essential keys to understanding cell renewal, aging and the body’s response to hunger and infections.
“The difficulties in studying the phenomenon meant that little was known until, in a series of brilliant experiments in the early 1990s, Yoshinori Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to identify the genes essential for autophagy “said the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute, which awards the prize.
“He then went on to elucidate the mechanisms underlying autophagy in yeast and demonstrated that a similar sophisticated mechanism was used in our cells,” she added.
The name autophagy was given to the process by the Belgian Christian de Duve, who had been one of the three Nobel laureates of medicine in 1974. He was also at the heart of the works which won the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry at the ‘American Irwin Rose and the Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko.
The process is essential for cell renewal. Our cells self-destruct by enclosing themselves in double-membrane vesicles before being delivered to lysosomes, organisms usually responsible for digesting and destroying waste and bacteria.
“What he showed was that they weren’t landfills, but recycling factories,” molecular professor Juleen Zierath summed up for the Nobel Foundation.
Maladies lysosomales
Its poor functioning can lead to all kinds of diseases, including those called “lysosomal”, of genetic origin, or Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s, myopathies, etc.
“The disturbances in autophagy have been linked to Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes and other disorders that appear in the elderly,” said the jury.
“Mutations in autophagy genes can cause genetic diseases. There is intense research underway to develop treatments that can target autophagy in different conditions,” he said.
Honorary professor at the Tokyo University of Technology (nicknamed Tokodai), he won eight million Swedish crowns (834,000 euros).
He “was a little surprised,” said jury secretary Thomas Perlmann, who called him before the announcement.
This field of research “did not attract much attention in the past, but now we are in an era where there is a stronger emphasis on it,” Ohsumi said on Japanese NHK television.
“If the autophagy function is defective, the nerve cells cannot function properly. In experimental studies it has also been seen that the embryo cannot develop normally”, underlined the president of the Nobel assembly of medicine, Rune Toftgård, on SVT television.
In 2015, the prize went to the Irish-American William Campbell, the Japanese Satoshi Omura and the Chinese Tu Youyou for their discoveries in treatments against parasitic infections and malaria.
Medicine is traditionally the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Must follow physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, peace on Friday, the economics prize on October 10 and literature on October 13.
The Norwegian jury which awards the peace prize was faced with an avalanche of nominations, 376, a hundred more than the previous record, including those involved in the peace agreement in Colombia and that on Iranian nuclear.
For literature, the Swedish Academy must decide, for example, between super-star novelists, like the American Philip Roth or the Japanese Haruki Murakami, and less read writers, like the Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse or the Syrian poet Adonis .
With AFP
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