Aaron Ciechanover

From WikiCover

On August 6, 2007, Protalix BioTherapeutics announced the appointment of Professor Aaron Ciechanover, a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to its Scientific Advisory Board.

Born in Haifa, Israel, Professor Ciechanover received his Master of Science in 1971 and his M.D. in 1974 from the Hadassah Medical School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received his Doctorate of Science in 1982 from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa and was trained as a post-doctoral fellow in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He is currently a Distinguished research Professor at the Cancer and Vascular Biology Research Center of the Rappaport Research Institute and Faculty of Medicine at the Technion.

As a graduate student at the Technion with Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin A. Rose from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Ciechanover discovered the ubiquitin-mediated proteolytic system. With this model it is now possible to understand at a molecular level how the cell controls a number of central processes by breaking down certain proteins. The three were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery. In addition, Dr. Ciechanover has received the 2000 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the 2003 Israel Prize in Biology. He is a member (Foreign) of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (Vatican), and of the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities.