
C. Ronald Kahn
Wolf Prize Laureate in Medicine 2016

The Prize Committee for Medicine has unanimously decided that the 2016 Wolf Prize be awarded to: C. Ronald Kahn and Lewis Cantley.
C. Ronald Kahn
Harvard Medical School, USA
“for pioneering studies defining insulin signaling and its alterations in disease.”
Kahn’s work has been a key to elucidating the pathogenesis of type II diabetes. His observation that the insulin receptor transmits insulin signals through activation of an intrinsic protein tyrosine kinase was the first step in unraveling the insulin signaling cascade. Thesestudies formed that basis of our present detailed understanding of the pathogenesis of insulin resistance, and in contemporaneous clinical studies, Kahn showed that insulin resistance precedes and leads to type II diabetes.
