Alexander Varshavsky, a Muscovite by birth but an American by nationality, has just won the Frontiers of Knowledge award from the BBVA Foundation in the Biomedicine category. Its main merit, discovering the mechanism of protein destruction that, when failing, causes diseases.
More precisely, as indicated in the minutes of the jury's decision, the award has been given to this researcher from the California Institute of Technology for "discovering the mechanisms involved in the degradation of proteins, as well as their fundamental importance in biological systems" . And it is that ubiquitin, a type of protein, binds to others and marks them for destruction. Failures in this marking mechanism are associated with a large number of diseases, such as Parkinson's.
Now, thanks to Varshavsky's discovery in the 1980s, many researchers around the world are working on therapeutic applications that address these diseases. In fact, the search for new drugs based on ubiquitins is one of the pharmaceutical areas with the most activity, investment and development. In the words of Varshavsky himself, " there is a huge medical research underway, both in pharmaceutical companies and in universities , to design small molecules that either inhibit or amplify many functional aspects of ubiquitins."
