Autophagy: Nobel Prize 2016 and allergy and asthma research

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi, Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, for “recycling.” Recycling on the cellular level is termed autophagy and is a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components. It is now well regarded that this process plays an important role not only in physiologic cellular homeostasis but also in a variety of diseases.