Yoshinori Ohsumi

Tokyo Institute of Technology

Yoshinori Ohsumi is a Japanese cell biologist and honorary professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of the mechanisms of autophagy — the fundamental process by which cells degrade and recycle their own components. Working with baker's yeast in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ohsumi devised an elegant microscopy-based screen that let him observe autophagic bodies accumulating in the vacuole, and he then identified the first autophagy-related (ATG) genes, opening the molecular genetics of a pathway that had been observed but poorly understood for decades. His work revealed that autophagy is essential to adaptation to starvation, embryonic development, immunity, and the clearance of damaged proteins and organelles, with deep implications for cancer, neurodegeneration such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and aging. Beyond the Nobel Prize he received the Kyoto Prize, the Gairdner International Award, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. The autophagy field he founded now drives an active biotech and pharmaceutical sector, making him a uniquely relevant anchor for outreach to cell-biology labs, drug-discovery teams, and the reagents, imaging, and screening tools used across basic and translational research.