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Israelis, American share Nobel Prize for cellular research

Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko and American Irwin Rose won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Tuesday for their work in discovering a process that lets cells destroy unwanted proteins.

Ciechanover, 57, Hershko, 67, and Rose, 78, were honored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work in the 1980s that discovered one of the cell's most important cyclical processes, regulated protein degradation.

The marked proteins are then chopped to pieces. When such degradation fails to work correctly, the result can be diseases like cervical cancer and cystic fibrosis. So research in this area may lead to new drugs for those diseases and others, the academy said.

"Thanks to the work of the three laureates it is now possible to understand at molecular level how the cell controls a number of central processes by breaking down certain proteins and not others," the academy said in its citation. "Examples of processes governed by ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation are cell division, DNA repair, quality control of newly produced proteins, and important parts of the immune defense."

Ciechanover is director of the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in Medical Sciences at the Technion, in Haifa, Israel, while Hershko, originally from Hungary, is a professor there.

Rose is a specialist at the department of physiology and biophysics at the college of medicine at the University of California-Irvine.
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