The 2016 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine goes to Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for discoveries about autophagy – how the body breaks down and recycles old cellular components, the BBC reports.

Ohsumi’s work is important because it helps explain what goes wrong in a range of diseases, from cancer to Parkinson’s.

He studied baker’s yeast to find the genes that regulate this “self eating” process.

Last year’s prize was shared by three scientists who developed treatments for malaria and other tropical diseases.