Prof. Bruce Beutler The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA

Bruce Beutler received his undergraduate education at the University of California, San Diego and his medical degree at the University of Chicago. He was an intern and resident at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, and a postdoctoral fellow and Assistant Professor at the Rockefeller University, where he isolated... read moreTNF, a lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced cytokine, and demonstrated its important role as a mediator of LPS effects and inflammation. Beutler returned to Dallas in 1986 as an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and studied the molecular regulation of TNF. Between 1993 and 1998 he positionally cloned the Lps locus of mice and determined that LPS sensing depends upon Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4). This work revealed the principal sensors of the innate immune system. Moving to The Scripps Research Institute in 2000, Beutler developed a mouse mutagenesis program and has used it to study many important problems in innate immunity.
In 2011 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, one half jointly with Jules Hoffmann "for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity", and the other half was awarded to Ralph Steinman "for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity". All three researchers present talks in The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection.