- Person
- Avram Hershko
- Lived
- b. 1937
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- Hungarian-born Israeli
The story
Avram Hershko was born in 1937 into a Jewish family in Karcag, Hungary. In 1944 he, his mother and brother were deported, but their train went to a labour camp in Austria rather than Auschwitz, and they survived. The family emigrated to Israel in 1950. Hershko trained as a doctor in Jerusalem and, from 1971, led biochemistry at the new medical faculty of the Technion in Haifa, where he set out to answer a neglected question: how do cells decide which of their own proteins to destroy?
With his graduate student Aaron Ciechanover, and during sabbaticals with Irwin Rose in Philadelphia, he found the answer in a series of experiments in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1978 they identified a small heat-stable protein, later recognised as ubiquitin, that was needed for the process. In 1980 they showed that chains of ubiquitin are attached to proteins marked for destruction, and between 1981 and 1983 they identified the three types of enzymes, E1, E2 and E3, that attach the tag. Tagged proteins are fed into cellular waste disposers called proteasomes and chopped up. The Nobel committee called the tag a “kiss of death” and awarded the three men the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The system turned out to control cell division, DNA repair, the quality control of new proteins and parts of the immune defence, and its failures play a role in diseases including cervical cancer and cystic fibrosis. Understanding it opened a new route to medicines. Bortezomib (Velcade), the first drug in a new class called proteasome inhibitors, was developed for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, before Velcade there was no effective treatment for the disease, and new drugs like it have helped turn myeloma into something closer to a chronic illness, so that patients live longer.
Why it matters
Knowledge of the ubiquitin system led to proteasome-inhibitor drugs that help people with multiple myeloma live longer, and guides research on many other diseases.
About Avram Hershko
Holocaust survivor and Technion biochemist who discovered how cells tag unwanted proteins for destruction, knowledge behind cancer drugs such as bortezomib. Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004.
Sources
- Popular information: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004 NobelPrize.org
- Avram Hershko, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Velcade: a breakthrough for multiple myeloma National Cancer Institute
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.