Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Japan's Yoshinori Ohsumi

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine was on Monday awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi from Japan. The announcement was made at the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Solna, Sweden.

Ohsumi is the 23th Nobel Laureate born in Japan and is a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Frontier Research Center. He was awarded the prize for "his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy". Autophagy is a process whereby the eukaryotic cell can recycle part of its own content. It's "self eating” is a process for degrading and recycling cellular components.

Ohsumi generated an enormous interest in autophagy which is now one of the most intensely studied areas of biomedical research. Read more about Ohsumi's work here.

The prize money the professor will receive is eight million Swedish Kronas (just over $1.2 million US). This year, 273 scientists were nominated for the prize in the area of Physiology or Medicine.

”I was surprised. I was in my lab” says Yoshinori Ohsumi on being awarded the 2016 #NobelPrize #Medicine. Interview to follow!

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2016

The 2015 Medicine Prize was awarded to William C Campbell, Satoshi Omura and Youyou Tu for their discoveries concerning novel therapies against River Blindness, Lymphatic Filariasis & Malaria.

(First appeared in DNA)