Aaron Ciechanover
Affiliations
The Polak Cancer and Vascular Biology Research Center, Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 31096, ISRAEL
Biography
Aaron Ciechanover was born in Israel in 1947. He is a distinguished Professor in the Technion in Haifa, Israel. He received his M.Sc. (1971) and M.D. (1973) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his Ph.D. from the Technion (1982), where as a graduate student with Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin Rose from Philadelphia, they discovered that tagging of protein substrates with ubiquitin, target them for degradation. Among the many prized he received are the 2000 Albert Lasker Award, the 2003 Israel Prize, and the 2004 Nobel Prize (Chemistry; shared with Drs. Hershko and Rose). He is a member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (NAS) and its Institute of medicine (IOM), and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican.
Abstract
The Ubiquitin Proteolytic System - From Basic Mechanisms thru Human Diseases and onto Drug Development
Cancer and Vascular Biology Research Center, Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
Between the 50s and 80s, when most researchers studied the central dogma, protein degradation was a neglected area. While it was known that proteins turn over, the high specificity of the process - where distinct proteins are degraded at certain time points or when they are denatured - was not appreciated. The discovery of the lysosome did not change this view as the mechanism of bulk uptake of cargo proteins to this organelle could not be substrate-specific.
The discovery of the ubiquitin pathway solved the enigma. Degradation of cellular proteins via this system is a tightly regulated process that plays major roles in all basic cellular processes. With the multitude of substrates targeted, it is not surprising that aberrations in the pathway have been implicated in the pathogenesis of many diseases, certain malignancies and neurodegeneration among them, and that the system has become a major platform for drug targeting.
