On October 11, 1974, in his apartment in New York in the United States, the doctor and biochemist Christian de Duve received a call announcing that he had been chosen to receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine with his colleagues Albert Claude and George Emil Palade , for their discoveries on the structural and functional organization of the cell. Thanks to this award, the UCLouvain professor created a research center which has become a key player in biomedical research in Belgium and internationally.
Born in England on October 2, 1917 and died in 2013 at the age of 95, Christian de Duve became a doctor of medicine, surgery and childbirth in 1941, graduated in chemistry in 1946 and quickly caught the virus. research. He was a researcher and teacher at UCLouvain but also carried out his research at Rockefeller University in New York, among the most renowned in the world.
Already rewarded several times in his career, the Belgian received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1974 for his discoveries on the structure and functioning of cells. Christian de Duve discovered lysosomes “by chance” while studying the mode of action of insulin in controlling blood sugar, recalls UCLouvain. These organelles present in cells play a stomach role by digesting unwanted molecules to recycle or eliminate them. If lysosomes malfunction, they become overloaded and can cause disease.
“This discovery has had a major impact on the understanding of pathologies such as rheumatism, cancer, arthritis and infections,” illustrates UCLouvain.
The prestigious award is still bearing fruit today, the university also welcomes. With Nobel money, Christian de Duve created a center focused on biomedical research that attempts to unravel the mysteries of human diseases at the molecular and cellular level. The de Duve Institute has since contributed to several major discoveries, including the discovery of tumor antigens which opened the way to immunotherapy, the identification of mechanisms at the origin of the resistance of cancer cells and the discovery the cause of chronic blood cancers which can lead to severe acute leukemia.
The de Duve Institute is today recognized worldwide, underlines UCLouvain. It has 320 scientists and employees from around the world and studies more than a hundred diseases in its 31 research laboratories.
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