# Avram Hershko

Source: https://onco.cc/people/avram-hershko/  
OnCo record `avram-hershko` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, and still works on how the machinery that destroys proteins controls cell division.

## Summary

Avram Hershko, with his then doctoral student Aaron Ciechanover and with Irwin Rose, showed in the late 1970s and early 1980s that cells destroy proteins in an energy-dependent, highly selective way by tagging them with ubiquitin. The three shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, one third each. Hershko's later work, still published from the Department of Biochemistry at the Technion's Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, is on the anaphase-promoting complex and the mitotic checkpoint: how the ubiquitylation of Cdc20 is controlled, how the mitotic checkpoint complex is disassembled, and therefore how a cell decides it is safe to divide. That is the biology every mitotic checkpoint and APC/C-directed drug programme rests on.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-25
- Tags: scientist; nobel-laureate; cancer-biology
- Role: Distinguished Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion
- Specialisms: Ubiquitin-proteasome system; Cell cycle regulation; Anaphase-promoting complex; Biochemistry

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avram_Hershko
- Technion: https://www.technion.ac.il/en/
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004: https://api.nobelprize.org/2.1/nobelPrize/che/2004
- PubMed author search: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Hershko%20A%5BAuthor%5D%20ubiquitin

## Connected records

- fronts: [Drug Discovery Platforms](https://onco.cc/fronts/drug-discovery/)
- technologies: [PROTACs & molecular glues (targeted protein degradation)](https://onco.cc/technologies/protac-degrader/)
- drugs: [Bortezomib](https://onco.cc/drugs/bortezomib/)
- institutions: [Technion, Israel Institute of Technology](https://onco.cc/institutions/technion/)

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