Our congratulations to Dr. Thomas C. Sϋdhof of Stanford University, a member of Cure Alzheimer’s Fund’s Research Consortium, who joins Randy Scheckman of the University of California, Berkeley and James E. Rothman of Yale University in winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine as announced today.

Dr. Sϋdhof has been a member of the Research Consortium since July of 2010. Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D., Chair of the Research Consortium and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, explains that the three distinguished scientists won the award for “showing how small cargo vesicles transport proteins and molecules inside of cells.” According to the Nobel Committee, Dr. Sϋdhof’s particular area of expertise has been “how signals instruct vesicles to release their cargo with precision.” Dr. Tanzi emphasizes that “understanding this process has been critical for elucidating how Alzheimer’s plaque and tangle pathology arises in the brain, especially at synapses.”

Cure Alzheimer’s Fund joins the many others around the world who send congratulations to these three distinguished scientists for helping us to understand the very basic functioning of cells in the body, and in Dr. Sϋdhof’s case, how these functions are characterized in the brain.