Winners of the Lasker Prize – 2014

The names of the winners of the 2014 Lasker Biomedical Awards
were announced last week

Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of MoscowThe Lasker Awards, awarded by The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, are called the American "Nobel Prize" in medicine, and its laureates are very likely to become laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

To date, there are already 86 such laureates of both awards.

This year, five people will become the winners of the Lasker Awards, which are awarded in three categories.

In the nomination "For Fundamental Medical Research", the Lasker Prize was awarded to 56-year-old Kazutoshi Mori from Kyoto University of Japan and 59-year-old Peter Walter from the University of California, San Francisco for work that has become fundamental in the study of a phenomenon called the unfolded protein response.

Maury and Walter's research began in the late 1980s, when scientists identified the stages at which the endoplasmic reticulum (an intracellular branched system of membrane-isolated vesicles and tubules where secreted proteins are processed) corrects proteins whose linear amino acid sequence has been folded into an incorrect three-dimensional structure. Mori and Walter found that the endoplasmic reticulum sends signals to the nucleus that activate genes responsible for correcting the shape of the tertiary protein structure. Improperly packaged proteins underlie diseases such as cystic fibrosis and retinitis pigmentosa.

The Lasker Prize "For Clinical Research" was awarded to 72-year-old Alim Louis Benabid from Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, and 76-year-old Mahlon DeLong from Emory University in Atlanta.

They, as well as Mori and Walter, started in the 1980s, and already in those years, showed that implantation of an electronic device stimulating the subthalamic nucleus of the brain of animals and people with Parkinson's disease can weaken tremor and other symptoms of the disease. In 2002, the FDA approved the use of this method for the treatment of Parkinson's disease at progressive stages.

68-year-old Mary-Claire King (Mary-Claire King) from the University of Washington (University of Washington) in Seattle will receive the Lasker Award in the nomination "For special achievements", in 1990 she discovered the gene predisposition to breast cancer BRCA1. In addition, King has developed a DNA analysis method to identify members of the same family. It was first used in Argentina, where during the dictatorship (1976-1983) children were separated from their parents, and thanks to the analytical approach of Mary-Claire King, many of those children found their relatives.

The Lasker Award ceremony will take place on September 19 in New York.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru17.09.2014