Japan’s Ohsumi wins Nobel prize in medicine for work on autophagy

The Nobel prize in medicine has been awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries on how the body’s cells detoxify and repair themselves.

The Japanese cell biologist, 71, will receive the prestigious 8m Swedish kronor (£718,000) award for uncovering “mechanisms for autophagy”.

Autophagy is the body’s internal recycling program – scrap cells are hunted down and the useful parts are stripped out to generate energy or create new cellular components. The process is crucial for preventing cancerous growths and, by maintaining a healthy metabolism, helps protect against conditions like diabetes.

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Dysfunctional autophagy has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and a host of age-related disorders. Mutations in autophagy genes can cause genetic disease. Intense research is already underway to develop drugs that can target autophagy in various diseases.

The word autophagy originates from two Greek words meaning “self-eating”. This concept emerged during the 1960s, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sack-like vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation.

Speaking to the Japanese broadcaster, NHK, Ohsumi said he was “extremely honoured” to have won the prize. “I wanted to do something different from other people,” he said. “I thought auto-decomposition was going to be an interesting topic.”

Difficulties in studying the phenomenon meant that little was known until, in a series of ground-breaking experiments in the early 1990s, Yoshinori Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy. He then went on to elucidate the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and showed that similar sophisticated machinery is used in human cells.

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Autophagy was not a fashionable subject when he started out as a scientist, according to Ohsumi. “I am not very competitive, so I always look for a new subject to study, even if it is not so popular,” he said in a 2012 interview. “If you start from some sort of basic, new observation, you will have plenty to work on.”

Professor David Rubinsztein, deputy director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research at the University of Cambridge, said that because autophagy is conserved across organisms – from yeast to humans – Ohsumi’s discoveries had provided deep insights into the basic biology underpinning infectious diseases, cancers, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s.

“I’m very happy he’s got this year’s Nobel prize, it’s very well deserved,” he said. “His lab mainly works in yeast. They did the initial screens that enabled the discovery of key genes that are involved in autophagy. So many other labs have exploited his discoveries, directly or indirectly, to see why it’s important in diseases.”

Giovanna Mallucci, a professor of clinical neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, said that Ohsumi’s discoveries were paving the way for new approaches to treating diseases, from cancer to neurodegenerative illnesses.

“I think it’s very important that this area of science been recognised,” she said. “The important principle here is going for common mechanisms in disease. It opens up avenues to treating these disorders that are different from more conventional disease-specific approaches.”

Last year, the prize was shared by three scientists for discoveries that helped doctors fight malaria and infections caused by roundworm parasites.

The Chinese chemist, Tu Youyou, was recognised for her discovery of artemisinin, one of the most effective treatments for malaria. Two other researchers, Satoshi Ōmura, an expert in soil microbes at Kitasato University, and William Campbell, an Irish-born parasitologist at Drew University in New Jersey, shared the other half of the prize, for the discovery of avermectin, a treatment for roundworm parasites.

The winners of the physics, chemistry and peace prizes are to be announced later this week. The economics prize will be announced on Monday 10 October.