Aaron J. Ciechanover
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology
|
Primary Section: 21, Biochemistry Secondary Section: 22, Cellular and Developmental Biology Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2007)
|
Biosketch
Aaron Ciechanover was born in Israel in 1947. He is a distinguished Professor in the Technion in Haifa, Israel. He received his M.Sc. (1971) and M.D. (1973) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his D.Sc. from the Technion (1982). There, as a graduate student with Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin Rose from Philadelphia, they discovered that tagging of protein substrates with ubiquitin, target them for degradation. Based on their discovery, several successful drugs have been developed, mostly against malignancies, but many more are in the pipeline. Among the many prizes he received are the 2000 Albert Lasker Award, the 2003 Israel Prize, and the 2004 Nobel Prize (Chemistry; shared with Drs. Hershko and Rose). Among many learnt bodies, he is a member of the Israeli National Academies of Sciences and Humanities, the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) and Medicine (NAM) of the USA (Foreign Member), and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican.
Research Interests
We are interested in the regulation of the ubiquitin-proteasome system for intracellular proteoplysis. In particular, we are studying the effect of ubiquitination on the pathogenesis of PolyQ expanded diseases, the involvement of NF-kB p105 processing in tumor suppression (unlike its 'canonical' role in tumorigenesis, the intracellular dynamics of the proteasome, and phase separation of the ubiquitin system components as a platform to make proteolysis on untoward proteins more efficient.
