Japanese cell biologist wins medicine Nobel

The Nobel prize in medicine has been awarded to a Japanese cell biologist for discoveries on how cells break down and recycle their own components.

Yoshinori Ohsumi, 71, has received the award for uncovering “mechanisms for autophagy”, a fundamental process in cells that scientists say can be harnessed to fight cancer and dementia.

Autophagy is the body’s internal recycling programme — scrap cell components are captured and the useful parts are stripped out to generate energy or build new cells. The process is crucial for preventing cancerous growths, warding off infection and, by maintaining a healthy metabolism, it helps protect against diabetes. Scientists had been aware of autophagy since around the 1960s, but knew little about how it worked.

At the time, researchers found a cell could destroy part of its own contents by transporting it to another compartment — called the lysosome — for degradation. But Ohsumi showed that the lysosome “wasn’t a waste dump — it was a recycling plant.”

The Nobel Prize winner “went on to elucidate the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast, and showed that similar sophisticated machinery is used in our cells.”

The term “autophagy” can be translated as “self eating,” and was first coined by scientists studying cell behavior in the 1960s.