Nobel Prize for Medicine awarded to Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi

Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday.

He was awarded the prize for his work on autophagy – the process by which cells in the human body break down and reuse old cellular components.

The term autophagy, coined by 1974 Medicine Laureate Christian de Duve, means self-eating.

Ohsumi identified the genes that control autophagy in baker’s yeast in a series of experiments in the 1990s.

He went on to show how the process worked in yeast and demonstrated how similar processes are at work in human cells.

Over the years it has been found that autophagy controls a number of important physiological functions.

It can rapidly provide fuel for energy and the building blocks for cell renewal and is thus important to the body when it is dealing with starvation and other types of stress.

It can also eliminate foreign bacteria and viruses after infection. It has also been shown to contribute to embryo development and cell differentiation.

Disruptions and mutations in the autophagy process have been linked to a number of diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes and other disorders appearing in the elderly.

Mutations in autophagy genes can cause genetic disease.

Disturbances to the mechanism have been linked to cancer.

Ohsumi’s discoveries have opened the door to research that attempts to design drugs which can target autophagy in these diseases.

When contacted for an interview by the Nobel organization, the winner was quoted as saying: “I was surprised. I was in my lab.”