TOKYO, Japan — Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for his discovery of how cells break down and recycles their content, which could lead to a better understanding of diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s and Type 2 diabetes.
“The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries on mechanisms for Autophagy,” Thomas Perlmann, Nobel Committee Secretary said.
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, including cancer and neurological disease.”
Ohsumi, born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, has been a Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009.