Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi wins medicine Nobel

Stockholm, Oct 3 (IANS) Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist specialising in autophagy and a professor in Tokyo Institute of Technology's Frontier Research Centre, was on Monday awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of the mechanism for autophagy, a process that deals with destruction of cells in the body.

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet decided to award the prize to Ohsumi as his discoveries led to a new paradigm in the "understanding of how the cell recycles its content".

"His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection," a statement on the official website of the Nobel Prize said.

It said that a mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease.