Proteins are the machines that drive our body. They are responsible for all our activities such as walking, seeing, hearing, heart beeping, digestion, respiration and secretion of waste materials. Unlike the items that surround us and that we use daily, like furniture and our clothes, the body proteins are in a dynamic state, they are being destroyed and renewed all the time and in an extensive manner. We are destroying daily up to 10% of our proteins and generating new ones instead. The obvious questions are: (i) why this occurs; (ii) what is the mechanism that carries out this function; (iii) what are the diseases that result if the mechanism does not work properly; and (iv) how we can cure these diseases. In the lecture we shall try to shed light on these problems, and understand the value of basic research for the development of drugs to target cancer and neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s.
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Aaron Ciechanover was born in Haifa, Israel in 1947. He is currently a Distinguished Research Professor in the Faculty of Medicine of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. He received his M.Sc. (1971) and M.D. (1975) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and his D.Sc. (1982) from the Technion. There, as a graduate student with Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin A. Rose from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, they discovered that covalent attachment of ubiquitin to the target protein substrate signals it for degradation.
As a post doctoral fellow with Dr. Harvey Lodish at the M.I.T., he continued his studies on the ubiquitin system and made additional important discoveries. Along the years it has become clear that ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis plays major roles in numerous cellular processes, and aberrations in the system underlie the mechanisms of many diseases, among them certain malignancies and neurodegenerative disorders. These studies resulted later in the development of a novel and successful anti-cancer drug, and many more are in the pipeline.
Among the many prizes that Dr. Ciechanover received are the 2000 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the 2003 Israel Prize in Biology and the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Among the many esteemed bodies, Dr. Ciechanover is a member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (Vatican), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Foreign Fellow), the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (Foreign Associate), and the Institute of Medicine of the USA National Academies (Foreign Fellow).
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