Japanese scientist wins Nobel medicine prize for work on "self-eating" cells

Japan's Yoshinori Ohsumi has won the 2016 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology for his discovery of how cells break down and recycle their content, which could lead to a better understanding of diseases like cancer, Parkinson's and type 2 diabetes.

"Ohsumi's discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content," the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement on awarding the prize.

"His discoveries opened the path to understanding ... many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection," the statement added.

Mr Ohsumi's work on cell breakdown, a field known as autophagy, is important because it can help explain what goes wrong in a range of diseases.

"Mutations in autophagy ('self eating') genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in severalconditions including cancer and neurological disease," the statement said.
 [rte.ie]
 3/10/16