The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy.

This year's Nobel Laureate discovered and elucidated mechanisms underlying autophagy, a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components.

The EU-funded CHIC project (Computational Horizons In Cancer: Developing Meta- and Hyper-Multiscale Models and Repositories for In Silico Oncology) proposes the development of clinical trial driven tools, services and secure infrastructure that will support the creation of multiscale cancer hypermodels (integrative models). The latter are defined as choreographies of component models, each one describing a biological process at a characteristic spatiotemporal scale, and of relation models/metamodels defining the relations across scales.

Efforts to tackle drug-resistant infections will require a global fund of at least $5 billion each year, researchers have projected. Experts in infectious diseases are calling for a World Bank Trust Fund to coordinate global action on this growing public health crisis. Growing resistance is leading to the emergence of superbugs that can cause life-threatening infections, such as MRSA or drug-resistant tuberculosis.

BioNTech AG, a fully integrated biotechnology company developing individualized cancer immunotherapies, together with its translational research partner institute TRON, announces a publication in the internationally renowned scientific journal Nature, describing the first example worldwide of a clinically relevant and systemic mRNA cancer immunotherapy.

Several studies have demonstrated the benefits of exercise to improve the quality of life of people with cancer. But Dr. Fred Saad, urologist-oncologist and researcher at the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM), goes further. He believes that physical exercise has a direct effect on cancer, as effective as drugs, for treating patients with prostate cancer, even in advanced stages of the disease.

Rutgers is taking a leading role in an IBM-sponsored World Community Grid project that will use supercomputing power to identify potential drug candidates to cure the Zika virus. The project, known as OpenZika, employs a global team of scientists who will perform "virtual" experiments in a search of treatments for the fast-spreading virus that the World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency.

Bengt Sjöberg, resident in Hong Kong but originally from Lysekil, Sweden, has founded the Sjöberg Foundation, to which he has donated SEK 2 billion. His hope is that this donation will make a difference to cancer research and the treatment currently received by cancer patients.