Caltech Press Release - Toward a Longer, Healthier Life:
"For Alexander Varshavsky, the Howard and Gwen Laurie Smits Professor of Cell Biology, it is the causes and alterations of the aging process that interest him. Every cell contains within it a molecular machine to eventually destroy its own proteins, he notes. The mechanisms and functions of this so-called regulated protein degradation became (mostly) understood over the last 25 years, in large part through discoveries in Varshavsky's lab. When a protein called ubiquitin is linked to another protein in a cell, that protein is marked for destruction. The molecular machines inside a cell that link ubiquitin to other proteins, and the intracellular machinery that 'recognizes' ubiquitin-linked proteins and destroys them, are elaborate and complex. 'Detailed understanding of these protein-destruction pathways will have a profound impact on the practice of medicine,' says Varshavsky, 'because all kinds of things that go wrong with us, from cancer and infectious diseases, to neurodegenerative syndromes and even normal aging, have a lot to do with either inherent imperfections of the ubiquitin system, or with an overt damage to it in a specific disease.' Many clinical drugs of the future, he notes, will be designed to suppress, enhance, or otherwise modify various aspects of the ubiquitin system."
