horwich-arthur

Arthur Horwich

FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE AWARD

Biology and Biomedicine

16th Edition

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine has gone in this sixteenth edition to F. Ulrich Hartl, Arthur Horwich, Kazutoshi Mori and Peter Walter "for revealing how cells control protein biogenesis and degradation, central not only to physiology but also disease pathogenesis and therapy".

CITATION (EXCERPT)

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Biology and Biomedicine category goes, in this sixteenth edition, to Franz Ulrich Hartl, Arthur Horwich, Kazutoshi Mori and Peter Walter.

Proteins adopt specific three-dimensional structures to fulfill their function. This is achieved in cells during protein synthesis with the help of a family of proteins called chaperones. F. Ulrich Hartl and Arthur Horwich discovered the first cellular pathway that instructs protein folding, which includes the discovery of the Hsp60 chaperone. When this process fails or the protein synthesis machinery overloads the chaperone pool, cells have a mechanism that targets misfolded proteins for degradation. This process, known as the unfolded protein response, was discovered by Kazutoshi Mori and Peter Walter.

Collectively, their groundbreaking findings revealed how cells control protein biogenesis and degradation, central not only to physiology but also disease pathogenesis and therapy.