Discovery of temperature and touch in medicine Nobel Prize winner

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was presented to two scientists who answered the essential questions about how humans feel fever and pain. Members of the Nobel Parliament said it was the key to basic survival and could be applied to find a cure for chronic pain.

Dr. David Julius, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and Dr. Aldem Patapoutian, a professor of Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, who was born in Bayroot, will share this year’s Nobel Prize. The award announced this morning shortly after contacting the winners. Each of them receives a gold medal and splits a prize worth about $ 350,000.

“This year’s Nobel Prize has to do with the ability to sense body temperature and tactile sensation, which is called somatosensory,” said Professor Thomas Pearlman, Secretary-General of the Nobel Parliament at the Karolinska Institute. “Imagine walking barefoot in the fields on a summer morning. You can feel the warmth of the sun. The coolness of the morning, the breeze of the caressing summer, and the fine texture of the leaves of the grass at your feet. These temperature, tactile, and motion impressions are sensations that depend on other sensations, so kinesthetic sensations give us the ability to feel the surface and internal organs of our body. It is temperature. Monitors the position and movement of our body, called pain, tactile sensation, and proprioception.

“Such information constantly flows from the skin and other deep tissues, connecting us to the outside and inside,” continued Perlmann. “It’s also essential for tasks that we perform without difficulty and without thinking too much.”

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday I made a series According to a quote from the Commission, a number of discoveries to clarify the cell dynamics of how these sensations occur. Their work affects everything from pain management to blood pressure regulation and bladder control.

Julius was cited in a study published between 1997 and 2002. In this study, the compound capsaicin found in chili peppers was used to identify sensors for nerve endings that cause pain in response to heat. He discovered that the gene was involved and tracked its role in the capsaicin receptor named TRPV1.

Patapoutian’s major treatise appeared between 2002 and 2015 as both he and Julius pursued the questions posed by the discovery of TRPV1. Some sensors were triggered by heat, others were also actuated by cold, and each used the chemical menthol to identify the receptor TRPM8.

Later, Patapoutian continued to work to understand how humans respond to mechanical stimuli. In a painstaking step, he and his collaborators used tactile-sensitive cell lines to examine 72 possible genes and discover which genes were involved in the cell’s response. After finding 2, the new channels were named Piezo1 and Piezo2 to represent pressure in Greek. The cellular processes identified in this study govern the physiologic processes that keep the body moving, such as the sensations that help regulate the bladder, control breathing, and stabilize the walls of blood vessels that maintain blood pressure.

Despite the widespread influence of basic science highlighted in the award on Monday, there was considerable speculation that Nobel might go to the winners associated with the development of the coronavirus vaccine. The first on the list is a Hungarian-born biochemist who worked in ambiguity for decades at the University of Pennsylvania until messenger RNA basic research formed the basis for both Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. It was Dr. Catalin Kariko.

But, as long-time Nobel watchers know, and as Perlmann responded to reporters, “It may be a related question, but it’s not really our way of working.”

In fact, more than 20 years after a study on the potential use of anti-CTLA-4 responses was published in 1996, and seven years after the FDA approved ipilimumab, Dr. Jim Allison gained Nobel’s share in 2018. I got it. His work in immunotherapy. Last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Dr. Jennifer Doudna and Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier, achieved the incredible speed of Nobel standards in their 2012 papers for their work on CRISPR Cas-9 genome editing technology. It has also been pointed out that Kariko could win this week’s Chemistry Award.

“We work on a nomination,” Perlmann said. “And whenever we receive a new nomination for us, we do a very thorough investigation. But, of course, great advances in medicine usually reach us. In this particular case. , I can’t say more than that. “