Two Americans shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for deciphering the communication system that the human body uses to sense the outside world and send messages to cells — for example, speeding the heart when danger approaches. The understanding is aiding the development of new drugs.
The winners, Dr. Robert J. Lefkowitz, 69, a professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher, and Dr. Brian K. Kobilka, 57, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, will split eight million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million
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For a long time, it remained a mystery how cells could sense their environment. Scientists knew that hormones such as adrenalin had powerful effects: increasing blood pressure and making the heart beat faster. They suspected that cell surfaces contained some kind of recipient for hormones. But what these receptors actually consisted of and how they worked remained obscured for most of the 20th Century.
Cells in our body are constantly exposed to a variety of chemical signals—hormones, neurotransmitters, growth factors, and sometimes even drugs—that they need to interpret and translate into a response. This task is handled by receptors that dot cell membranes. Lefkowitz essentially defined the field of receptor biology through his work with G protein–coupled receptors, the largest and most pervasive family of cell receptors. A thousand or more of these receptors are known to exist throughout the body, playing critical roles in sight, smell, and taste, and in regulating heart rate, blood pressure, pain tolerance, glucose metabolism, and virtually all known physiological processes.
For a long time, it remained a mystery how cells could sense their environment. Scientists knew that hormones such as adrenalin had powerful effects: increasing blood pressure and making the heart beat faster. They suspected that cell surfaces contained some kind of recipient for hormones. But what these receptors actually consisted of and how they worked remained obscured for most of the 20th Century.
Cells in our body are constantly exposed to a variety of chemical signals—hormones, neurotransmitters, growth factors, and sometimes even drugs—that they need to interpret and translate into a response. This task is handled by receptors that dot cell membranes. Lefkowitz essentially defined the field of receptor biology through his work with G protein–coupled receptors, the largest and most pervasive family of cell receptors. A thousand or more of these receptors are known to exist throughout the body, playing critical roles in sight, smell, and taste, and in regulating heart rate, blood pressure, pain tolerance, glucose metabolism, and virtually all known physiological processes.
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