Recent winners of the Nobel Medicine Prize

(FILES) Nobel medals are displayed at the laboratory of Alfred Nobel, where powder trials and experiments with artificial rubber and synthetic threads were carried out, in Karlskoga, Sweden on September 16, 2021. On Monday, October 2, 2023, a week of announcements of the Nobel Prize will kick off. The awards, first handed out in 1901, were created by Swedish inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel in his 1895 will to celebrate those who have “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” (Photo by Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP)

Here is a list of the winners of the Nobel Medicine Prize in the past 10 years:

2022: Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.

2021: US duo David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discoveries on human receptors responsible for our ability to sense temperature and touch.

2020: Americans Harvey Alter and Charles Rice, together with Briton Michael Houghton, for the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus, leading to the development of sensitive blood tests and antiviral drugs.

2019: William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza of the US and Britain’s Peter Ratcliffe for establishing the basis of our understanding of how cells react and adapt to different oxygen levels.

2018: Immunologists James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, for figuring out how to release the immune system’s brakes to allow it to attack cancer cells more efficiently.

2017: US geneticists Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young for their discoveries on the internal biological clock that governs the wake-sleep cycles of most living things.

2016: Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his work on autophagy — a process whereby cells “eat themselves” — which when disrupted can cause Parkinson’s and diabetes.

2015: William Campbell, an Irish-US citizen, Satoshi Omura of Japan and Tu Youyou of China for unlocking treatments for malaria and roundworm.

2014: American-born Briton John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser of Norway for discovering how the brain navigates with an “inner GPS”.

2013: Thomas C. Sudhof, a US citizen born in Germany, and James E. Rothman and Randy W. Schekman of the US for work on how the cell organises its transport system.