STOCKHOLM – Three scientists who unlocked secrets of the body’s immune system, opening doors to new vaccines and cancer treatments, won the 2011 Nobel prize for medicine yesterday.
American Bruce Beutler and French biologist Jules Hoffmann, who studied the first stages of immune responses to attack, share the $1.5 million (€1.1 million) award with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman, whose discovery of dendritic cells in the 1970s is key to understanding the body’s next line of defence against disease.
However, within minutes of the award being announced, a problem arose. It emerged that one of the three, Mr Steinman, had died of cancer just three days before he could be told of his award. A sufferer of pancreatic cancer, he used his own discoveries to extend his life.
Colleagues of Mr Steinman (68) at Rockefeller University in New York called it a “bittersweet” honour.
The Nobel committee at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which does not make posthumous awards, said it was aware of Mr Steinman’s death.
Swedish officials on the committee were rushing to try to clarify what secretary general Goran Hansson called a “unique situation, because he died hours before the decision was made”. Mr Hansson told Swedish news agency TT the panel would review what to do with the prize money, due to rules against posthumous awards. But it would not name a substitute winner.
Announcing the award to the three, the committee said they had “revolutionised our understanding of the immune system by discovering key principles for its activation”.
Lars Klareskog, who chairs the prize-giving Nobel assembly, said: “I am very excited about what these discoveries mean. I think that we will have new, better vaccines against microbes and that is very much needed now with the increased resistance against antibiotics.”
Mr Beutler (53) is based at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Luxembourg-born Mr Hoffmann (70) conducted much of his work in Strasbourg. They will share half the 10 million Swedish crowns in prize money. The other half of the award was deemed given to Mr Steinman.
The work of the three scientists has been pivotal to the development of improved types of vaccines against infectious diseases and novel approaches to fighting cancer. The research has helped lay the foundations for a new wave of “therapeutic vaccines” that stimulate the immune system to attack tumours.
Better understanding of the complexities of the immune system has also given clues for treating inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, where the components of the self-defence system end up attacking the body’s own tissues.
Mr Beutler and Mr Hoffmann discovered in the 1990s that receptor proteins act as a first line of defence – innate immunity – by recognising bacteria and other micro-organisms. Mr Steinman’s work explained how, if required, dendritic cells in the next phase – adaptive immunity – kill off infections that break through.
Understanding dendritic cells led to the launch of the first therapeutic cancer vaccine last year, Dendreon’s Provenge, which treats men with advanced prostate cancer.
“We live in a dangerous world. Pathogenic micro-organisms threaten us continuously,” the Nobel panel said, describing the work over the decades in understanding our defences.
“The first line of defence, innate immunity, can destroy invading micro-organisms and trigger inflammation . . . If micro-organisms break through this defence line, adaptive immunity is called into action . . . It produces antibodies and killer cells that destroy infected cells . . . These two defence lines . . . provide good protection against infections, but they also pose a risk: inflammatory disease may follow.”
Medicine, or physiology, is usually the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901, in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.
The award citation noted that the world’s scientists had long been searching for the “gatekeepers” of immune response.
Mr Hoffmann’s pioneering research was conducted on fruit flies, highlighting how key elements of modern human biology have been conserved through evolution. The immune system exists primarily to protect against infections but it can also protect against some cancers by targeting rogue cells before they proliferate.
Sometimes, however, the immune system goes into overdrive and attacks healthy tissue, leading to auto-immune inflammatory diseases, such as type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.
The effect is often compared to “friendly fire” in combat. – (Reuters)
DEDICATED TO RESEARCH: 2011 NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE
Ralph Steinman was born in 1943 in Canada and, at the time of his death, was based in Rockefeller University, New York.
In 1973 he coined the term dendritic cells while working as a postdoc in the lab of Zanvil Cohn, also at Rockefeller University.
Dendritic cells are immune cells whose main function is to process antigen material and present it on the surface to other cells of the immune system.
The cells are present in tissues in contact with the external environment, such as the skin (where there is a specialised dendritic cell type called Langerhans cells) and the inner lining of the nose, lungs, stomach and intestines.
They can also be found in an immature state in the blood.
Once activated, they migrate to the lymph nodes where they interact with T cells and B cells to initiate and shape the adaptive immune response.
Bruce Beutler was born in 1957 in Chicago, Illinois. He is an American immunologist and geneticist. He is a professor and chairman of the department of genetics at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California.
During his childhood and early adolescence, he developed a lasting interest in biological science. Later he did extensive research on the biology of lipopolysaccharide and herpes viruses in order to understand inborn host resistance to infectious diseases, often referred to as innate immunity.
Jules Hoffmann was born in 1941 in Echternach, Luxembourg.
He is a French citizen, research director and member of the board of administrators of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS).
In 2007 he became president of the French Academy of Sciences.
He graduated in biology and chemistry and received his PhD in biology from the University of Strasbourg in 1969.
Between 1978 and 2005 he was director of the CNRS research unit 9022: immune response and development in insects. From 1993 to 2005 he was director of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the CNRS in Strasbourg.