The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine to Yoshinori Oshumi (Fukuoka, 1945), a scientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), for his role in studying the mechanisms underlying the autophagy.
Autophagy consists of a kind of cellular ‘self-feeding’ , in which the cell can destroy its own contents by enclosing them in membranes and forming vesicles that are transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for further degradation.
The Japanese researcher has been able to identify the mechanisms necessary for autophagy in yeast and demonstrate that this machinery is similar to that used in our cells. His discoveries led to a new paradigm in understanding how the cell is able to recycle its content, and its importance in physiological processes as important as adaptation to starvation or response to infection.
After this finding and the other scientists who followed in its footsteps, we now know that autophagy controls important physiological functions in which cellular components need to be degraded and recycled.
This cellular recycling serves to eliminate bacteria and viruses, obtain fuel and degrade material damaged by aging. A process that is related to diseases such as Parkinson’s and cancer.
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine was shared by researchers William C. Campbell, Satoshi Omura and Youyou Tu, for new therapies against parasites and malaria that affect the most disadvantaged populations on the planet.
