Yasutomi Nishizuka
Wolf Prize Laureate in Medicine 1994/5
Yasutomi Nishizuka
Affiliation at the time of the award:
Kobe University School of Medicine, Japan
Award citation:
“for their discoveries concerning cellular transmembrane signalling involving phospholipids and calcium”.
Prize share:
Yasutomi Nishizuka
Michael J. Berridge
Working independently, Professors Berridge and Nishizuka have dramatically advanced our understanding of signal transduction cascades that regulate a wide variety of cellular processes, including secretion, fertilization, cellular growth and differentiation, and information processing in the brain.
Yasutomi Nishizuka discovered the protein kinase C family and its activation by extracellular signalling agents via the breakdown of membrane hospholipids. Through meticulous enzymological studies Nishizuka and his colleagues demonstrated that protein kinase C is activated by diacylglycerol and calcium. Work fromhis laboratory and subsequently from many other laboratories has established that the enzymes in the protein kinase C family are involved in a wide variety of cellular processes. Protein kinase C also mediates certain pathological conditions, such as the promotion of tumours by phorbol esters. It is thus another of the fundamental mediators of cellular responses to environmental signals.