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My name is Luke O'Neill.
I am Professor of Biochemistry
in the Trinity Biomedical
Sciences Institute,
part of the School
of Biochemistry and Immunology.
So what I'm going to be
telling you all about
is a family of receptors
called the toll-like receptors,
and then I'm also going to
tell you about related innate
immune receptor systems,
because this area
has undergone a major explosion of
information in the past 10 years or so.
And a discovery of these
receptors has greatly helped
our understanding of
innate immunity and also
of the inflammatory process.
And there's lots of insights
coming out of this research
into diseases like arthritis,
metabolic diseases like diabetes,
atherosclerosis.
And really, many people
see these discoveries
as being the most important
in the past 10 years
or so in the whole
field of immunology.
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Now, this area, of course, is
extremely important for medicine
and that can be seen in the
award in 2011 of the Nobel
Prize for Physiology or Medicine
for the area of innate immunity,
and these three scientists,
Bruce Beutler, Jules Hoffmann,
and Ralph Steinman, were
given this great honor.
And everybody in the
field of immunology
is delighted to see this honor being
given because their discoveries,
as I say, really have had a huge
influence on the whole field
of immunology and also the
basis for many diseases,
including inflammatory diseases.
And what Bruce Beutler
and Jules Hoffman won for
was effectively discovering
the toll-like receptor system.
Jules in particular found
toll in the fruit fly,
and his lab discovered
this as having
a key role in anti-fungal
community in the fly.
And then Bruce Beutler
found the mammalian system
of toll-like receptors, in
particular that toll-like number
four can sense a product called
lipopolysaccharide or LPS,
from gram negative bacteria.
And this is a big step up in
our understanding about how
the immune system senses bacteria.
And then thirdly, Ralph
Steinman, he won the Nobel Prize
for discovering dendritic cells.
And these are the key front
line cells in innate immunity.
And they also become activated and
then trigger adaptive immunity.
So in many ways, the three
of them combined, then,
reflect these recent discoveries
in the area of toll-like receptors
and innate immunity.
