Nobel Prize Awarded for Medicine!

Japan's Yoshinori Ohsumi has won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology, for his discovery of how cells break down and recycle their content, which could lead to a better understanding of diseases like Cancer, Parkinson's and Type 2 diabetes.

"Ohsumi's discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content," the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement on awarding the prize.
"His discoveries opened the path to understanding ... many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection," the statement added.
Mr Ohsumi's work on cell breakdown, a field known as autophagy, is important because it can help explain what goes wrong in a range of diseases.
"Mutations in autophagy ('self eating') genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease," the statement said.




Mr Ohsumi, born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, has been a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009.
"I am extremely honoured," he told Kyoto News agency.
The prize for Physiology or Medicine is the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year.

Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901, in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.

NUI Galway Centre Opens!

A €68m centre for medical device research will be officially launched at NUI Galway today.
The Centre for Research in Medical Devices will involve more than 250 researchers from a total of six academic institutions across the country, which is receiving support through Science Foundation Ireland.




The medtech industry in Ireland is booming, with more than 400 firms in operation, employing 29,000 people, and producing nearly €13 billion worth of exports a year.

Based at NUI Galway, Cúram will bring together areas like glycoscience, biomaterials science, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, drug delivery and medical device design.
It will train graduates from basic science right through to clinical application.
It will develop medical devices that mimic the body's biology, targeting chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes and Parkinson's.
Devices like electrodes that degrade inside the body and 3D printed tendons and muscles will also be designed.
The centre has secured €68m in funding, with €37m coming from SFI, €12.5 million from two dozen Irish and multinational industry partners and €19 million from the EU's Horizon 2020 research fund.
Cúram will be opened by Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Mary Mitchell O'Connor, who has welcomed its establishment.