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BREAKING NEWS The 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”

Did you know that all living things have DNA within their cells? For the organism to live and develop, its DNA cannot change, but DNA molecules aren't completely stable and can also be damaged. Aziz Sancar was one of three scientists to receive the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “mechanistic studies of DNA repair.” His research showed that DNA damaged by ultraviolet light can be fixed with certain repair enzymes. In the human body, each cell's genome undergoes thousands and thousands of changes each day and the DNA copying for cell division happens millions of times. DNA can be damaged by both ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun, environmental pollutants, and toxins. By studying bacteria, Sancar discovered and mapped out how cells can repair this damage from UV light which has allowed researchers further insight into cellular homeostasis and ageing. Read more: bit.ly/2Dle84x

This year’s medicine laureate Shimon Sakaguchi discovered a new class of T cells. Sakaguchi was swimming against the tide in 1995, when he made a key discovery. At the time, many researchers were convinced that immune tolerance only developed due to potentially harmful immune cells being eliminated in the thymus, through a process called central tolerance. Sakaguchi showed that the immune system is more complex and discovered a previously unknown class of immune cells, which protect the body from autoimmune diseases. #NobelPrize