Wolf Prize in Medicine

Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates The Wolf Prize in Medicine is awarded annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics and Arts. The Prize has been stated to be the second most prestigious award in scienceTemplate:Fact and a significant predictor of the Nobel Prize.

Laureates

Source:

Year	Name	Nationality	Citation
1978	George D. Snell		for discovery of H-2 antigens, which codes for major transplantation antigens and the onset of the immune response.
	Jean Dausset		for discovering the HL-A system, the major histocompatibility complex in man and its primordial role in organ transplantation.
	Jon J. van Rood		for his contribution to the understanding of the complexity of the HL-A system in man and its implications in transplantation and in disease.
1979	Roger Wolcott Sperry		for his studies on the functional differentiation of the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
	Arvid Carlsson		for his work which established the role of dopamine as a neurotransmitter.
	Oleh Hornykiewicz		for opening a new approach in the control of Parkinson's disease by L-Dopa.
1980	César Milstein Leo Sachs James L. Gowans	/ ; ;	for their contributions to knowledge of the function and dysfunction of the body cells through their studies on the immunological role of the lymphocytes, the development of specific antibodies and the elucidation of mechanisms governing the control and differentiation of normal and cancer cells.
1981	Barbara McClintock		for her imaginative and important contributions to our understanding of chromosome structure behaviour and function, and for her identification and description of transposable genetic (mobile) elements.
	Stanley N. Cohen		for his concepts underlying genetic engineering; for constructing a biologically functional hybrid plasmid, and for achieving actual expression of a foreign gene implanted in E. coli by the recombinant DNA method.
1982	Jean-Pierre Changeux		for the isolation, purification and characterization of the acetylcholine receptor.
	Solomon H. Snyder		for the development of the ways to label neurotransmitter receptors which provide tools to describe their properties.
	James W. Black		for developing agents which block beta adrenergic and histamine receptors.
1983/4	No award
1984/5	Donald F. Steiner		for his discoveries concerning the bio-synthesis and processing of insulin which have had profound implications for basic biology and clinical medicine.
1986	Osamu Hayaishi		for his discovery of the oxygenase enzymes and elucidation of their structure and biological importance.
1987	Pedro Cuatrecasas Meir Wilchek	Template:SPN	for the invention and development of affinity chromatography and its applications to biomedical sciences.
1988	Henri G. Hers Elizabeth F. Neufeld		for the biochemical elucidation of lysosomal storage diseases and the resulting contributions to biology, pathology, prenatal diagnosis and therapeutics.
1989	John Gurdon		for his introduction of the xenopus oocyte into molecular biology and his demonstration that the nucleus of a differentiated cell and of the egg differ in expression but not in the content of genetic material.
	Edward B. Lewis		for his demonstration and exploration of the genetic control of the development of body segments by homeotic genes.
1990	Maclyn McCarty		for his part in the demonstration that the transforming factor in bacteria is due to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and the concomitant discovery that the genetic material is composed of DNA.
1991	Seymour Benzer		for having generated a new field of molecular neurogenetics by his pioneering research on the dissection of the nervous system and behavior by gene mutations.
1992	M. Judah Folkman		for his discoveries which originated the concept and developed the field of angiogenesis research.
1993	No award
1994/5	Michael J. Berridge Yasutomi Nishizuka		for their discoveries concerning cellular transmembrane signalling involving phospholipids and calcium.
1995/6	Stanley B. Prusiner		for discovering prions, a new class of pathogens that cause important neurodegenerative disease by inducing changes in protein structure.
1997	Mary Frances Lyon		for her hypothesis concerning the random inactivation of X-chromosomes in mammals.
1998	Michael Sela Ruth Arnon		for their major discoveries in the field of immunology.
1999	Eric R. Kandel		for the elucidation of the organismic, cellular and molecular mechanisms whereby short-term memory is converted to a long-term form.
2000	No award
2001	Avram Hershko Alexander Varshavsky	/ ; /	for the discovery of the ubiquitin system of intracellular protein degradation and the crucial functions of this system in cellular regulation.
2002/3	Ralph L. Brinster		for the development of procedures to manipulate mouse ova and embryos, which has enabled transgenesis and its applications in mice.
	Mario Capecchi Oliver Smithies	/ ; /	for their contribution to the development of gene-targeting, enabling elucidation of gene function in mice.
2004	Robert A. Weinberg		for his discovery that cancer cells including human tumor cells, carry somatically mutated genes-oncogenes that operate to drive their malignant proliferation.
	Roger Y. Tsien		for his seminal contribution to the design and biological application of novel fluorescent and photolabile molecules to analyze and perturb cell signal transduction.
2005	Alexander Levitzki		for pioneering signal transduction therapy and for developing tyrosine kinase inhibitors as effective agents against cancer and a range of other diseases.
	Anthony R. Hunter	/	for the discovery of protein kinases that phosphorylate tyrosine residues in proteins, critical for the regulation of a wide variety of cellular events, including malignant transformation.
	Anthony J. Pawson	/	for his discovery of protein domains essential for mediating protein-protein interactions in cellular signaling pathways, and the insights this research has provided into cancer.
2006/7	No award
2008/9	Howard Cedar Aharon Razin		for their fundamental contributions to our understanding of the role of DNA methylation in the control of gene expression.
2010	Axel Ullrich		for groundbreaking cancer research that has led to development of new drugs.
2011	Shinya Yamanaka Rudolf Jaenisch	Template:JAP; /	for the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from skin cells (SY) and demonstration that iPS cells can be used to cure genetic disease in a mammal, thus establishing their therapeutic potential (RJ).
2012	Ronald M. Evans		for his discovery of the gene super-family encoding nuclear receptors and elucidating the mechanism of action of this class of receptors.
2013	No award
2014	Nahum Sonenberg	/	for his discovery of the proteins that control the protein expression mechanism and their operation.
	Gary Ruvkun Victor Ambros	;	for the discovery of the micro-RNA molecules that play a key role in controlling gene expression in natural processes and disease development.
2015	John Kappler Philippa Marrack	;	for major contributions to the understanding of the key antigen-specific molecules, the T cell receptor for antigen and antibodies and how these molecules participate in immune recognition and effector function.
	Jeffrey Ravetch
2016	C. Ronald Kahn		for pioneering studies defining insulin signaling and its alterations in disease.
	Lewis C. Cantley		for discovery of phosphoinositide- 3 kinases and their roles in physiology and disease.
2017	James P. Allison		for a revolution in cancer treatment due to the discovery of the immune control barrier.
2018	No award
2019	Jeffrey M. Friedman		for the discovery of Leptin and the entirely new endocrine system controlling body weight (and many other processes).
2020	Emmanuelle Charpentier		for deciphering and repurposing the bacterial CRISPR/Cas9 immune system for genome editing.
	Jennifer Doudna		for revealing the medicine-revolutionizing mechanism of bacterial immunity via RNA-guided genome editing.
2021	Joan Steitz		for her many fundamental contributions to the field of RNA biology.
	Lynne Elizabeth Maquat		for discovering a mechanism that destroys mutant messenger RNA in cells, nonsense-mediated mRNA decay.
	Adrian Krainer	/	for his fundamental mechanistic discoveries on RNA splicing leading to a world’s first treatment for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).
2022	No award
2023	Daniel J. Drucker		for pioneering work in elucidating the mechanisms and therapeutic potential of enteroendocrine hormones.
2024	Botond Roska José-Alain Sahel	/ Switzerland; /	for sight-saving and vision restoration to blind people using optogenetics.
2025	Pamela J. Bjorkman		for pioneering innovative strategies to overcome viral defenses through novel antibody-focused approaches.

Laureates per country

Below is a chart of all laureates per country (updated to 2025 laureates). Some laureates are counted more than once if they have multiple citizenships.

Country	Number of laureates
United States	39
United Kingdom	9
Israel	8
France	4
Japan	3
Canada	3
Germany	2
Hungary	2
Italy	1
Spain	1
Argentina	1
Netherlands	1
Sweden	1
Austria	1
Belgium	1
Uruguay	1
Russia	1
Switzerland	1

See also

• List of medicine awards

External links

• Wolf Prizes 2015
• Jerusalempost Israel-Wolf-Prizes 2016
• Jerusalempost Israel-Wolf-Prizes 2017
• Wolf Prize 2019