2016 Nobel Prize for medicine goes to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his autophagy discoveries

2016 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine goes to Yoshinori Ohsumi for discoveries about autophagy – how the body breaks down and recycles cellular components.

His fundamental work is important because it helps explain what goes wrong in a range of diseases, from cancer to Parkinson’s.

BREAKING NEWS The 2016 #NobelPrize #Medicine awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi @tokyotech_en ”for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy” pic.twitter.com/PDxWbSqoIX

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2016

Autophagy is a normal physiological process in the body that deals with destruction of cells in the body. It maintains homeostasis or normal functioning by protein degradation and turnover of the destroyed cell organelles for new cell formation. During cellular stress the process of autophagy is upscaled and increased.