Announcement of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

so ladies and gentlemen good morning and very much welcome to nobel forum for the announcement of this year's nobel prize in physiology or medicine so my name is thomas perlman and i'm the secretary of the nobel assembly i will first read the announcement in swedish followed by english we will then present background to the discoveries and open up for questions so here we go in swedish institute elder medicine or suggested so to english the nobel assembly at karolinsk institute that has today decided to award the 2021 nobel prize in physiology or medicine jointly to david julius and ardham pataputian for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch here are the two lawyers david julius was born in 1955 in new york he performed his prize-winning studies at university of california san francisco where he's still active ardhan pataputyan was born in 1967 in beirut in lebanon in his youth he moved to los angeles in the usa he performed his price-winning work at scripps research la jolla california where he's still active i will now turn to professor patrick ernforce adjunct member of the nobel committee who will now describe the discovery thank you this year's nobel prize concerns our senses our senses allow us to perceive and interpret the world around us specialized sense organs such as our eyes ears nose and mouth and ours with vision hearing smell and taste this year's nobel prize has to do with our ability to feel temperature and touch a sense which is called somato sensation imagine that you're walking barefoot across a field on a summer's morning you can feel the warmth of the sun the coolness of the morning jew a caressing summer breeze and the fine texture of blades of grass underneath your feet these impressions of temperature touch and movement are feelings relying on somatosensation somali sensation is what gives us the ability to feel our body surface and internal organs it monitors temperature pain touch and the location and movement of our body called proprioception such information continuously flows from the skin and other deep tissues and connects us with the external and internal world it is also essential for tasks that we perform effortlessly and without much thought for example when taking a coffee on the go a flow of information from sensors in legs and arms keep track on their position in space sensors in the skin registers the texture size and shape of the coffee cup how warm it is and correct the grip strength to keep a hold on the cup our physical stimuli such as heat and touch can be registered has fascinated humankind for thousands of years the french philosopher rene descartes envisioned in the 17th century how this could work invoking a thread between the skin and the brain moving particles of fire on the skin pull the thread and open the valve in the brain during the past century scientists discovered specialized sensory neurons which have long processes called nerves the nerves located in for example the skin or muscle registers changes in our external and internal environment there are different types of nerves that detect different kinds of stimuli such as heat and touch but how can heat and touch be registered by the nervous system in some way the nerves must convert the physical stimuli of heat and touch into a biological signal thus molecular receptors must exist on nerves that detect and convert heat and touch into nerve impulses the identity of such receptors remained unknown until this year's prize-winning work capsaicin the active component of chili peppers was an essential tool for one of the awarded discoveries when we eat the spicy meal with chili peppers it gives a burning sometimes even painful sensation we start sweating thus it seems that capsizing can trick the brain into thinking there is an actual change in body temperature it was known that capsaicin activates sensory neurons and that this activation is responsible for the burning sensation when eating chili peppers however the molecular receptor detecting capsizing remained a mystery now we turn to the work that gave rise to this year's nobel prize david julius and his co-workers wished to identify the receptor for capsizing on sensory neurons julius assumed that a single gene active in sensory neurons was responsible he therefore made millions of dna fragments corresponding to the genes that are active in sensory neurons hoping that at least one of these would contain the gene for the capsizing receptor he introduced single dna fragments into cells that are insensitive to capsizine and then added capsizing and recorded activity this was a high risk project but after looking through large amounts of dna fragments the team finally succeeded and identified the capsizing receptor it turned out to be a novel protein named trip v1 localized in the cell's outer membrane trip v1 was shown to function as a channel for so-called ions when julius tested how trip v1 reacted to warm temperatures he noticed that heat opened a channel for ions he had discovered a temperature sensitive ion channel activated by heat that is perceived as painful a few years later julius and the other laureate of this year arden pataputyan independently searched for a code sensitive channel and discovered a related channel trip m8 soon after this additional related channels were shown to contribute to temperature sensitivity we now know that a number of different trip channels activated at different temperature intervals act together to code for temperature sensation and for heat induced pain while the mechanism for temperature sensation was unfolding the molecular mechanism for the sensation of touch remained an enigma the sensational touch is started by mechanical force such as when poking on the skin this can be mimicked in a simpler cell system by directly poking on the membrane of a cell while at the same time measuring activity of the same cell autumn pataputyan and co-workers used this system and identified a cell line that was mechanosensitive in these cells paraphutian identified 72 candidate genes that he thought could be the critical sensor activated by mechanical force one by one each of the 72 candidate genes was silenced and the cells were tested for mechanosensitivity after nearly a year of painstaking work 71 of the 72 genes had been tested without any promising results but when gene number 72 was silenced sensitivity to poking was lost the mechanosensitive receptor had been discovered and was named pso1 after the greek word for pressure pse through its similarity to pso1 a second gene was found and was named pso2 parapotion demonstrated that pso proteins belong to an entirely novel class of proteins and function as ion channels activated by mechanical force importantly pso2 was then found to be the long sword sensor for touch and proprioception sensors we use for example in a hug so to summarize the work by david julius and arden pataputyan has unlocked one of the secrets of nature by explaining the molecular basis for sensing temperature and mechanical force this represents a foundation for our perception of temperature heat pain touch and the location and movement of our body called proprioception in further work trip and pso channels have been found to play key roles in many aspects of physiology thus establishing far reaching roles of the newly identified temperature and mechanically sensitive ion channels thank you patrick so here we have the two warheads again and i would like to open up for a few questions i know many of you probably want to have separate interviews but please go ahead if there is any question yes yeah it was a tough year getting in touch with them so the reason we were a few minutes late in here was actually that i i just managed to get hold of them with the help of one father and one sister-in-law so it was some tracing of phone numbers and i just got hold of them only had a few minutes to talk to them but they were incredibly happy and as far as i could tell they were very surprised uh and a little bit shocked maybe so it was a pleasure really to give them these news hello paul reese al jazeera english uh why was it decided that this breakthrough was the most important this year just this particular one out of all all the possible ones uh what's the question why we how we decided that it was the most important uh yeah i mean uh it's it's uh maybe a little bit hard to to answer without sort of breaching confidentiality we always have fantastic uh candidates in front of us that we investigate over the year and our job is to select uh the candidates that we this year find to be the most worthy winners of this year's prize and in this in this case this has been our choice and it's hard to give some any more details on that the scientific reason i think was marvelously uh told by professor iron force here this really unlocks one of the secrets of nature in in terms of being one of our senses uh and and it explains at a molecular level now how nerve signals can be converted or these stimuli can be converted into nerve signals so that we can adapt it's actually something that is crucial for our survival so it's very important and profound discovery yeah i'll think i'll pass the word to uh nils professor nielsen larson who is part of the panel and the chair of the nobel committee thank you that's of course a very good question i mean we are awarding here a a very major basic scientific discovery of receptors for temperature and touch and as you know there is a lot of medical problems involving pain and these novel receptors will for sure be targets for drug development in the future so i think like all the big basic scientific discoveries there will be also translational effects in the future in the future with development of treatments that's one okay okay same question yes david keaton again from the associated press now obviously we can't really not talk about covid uh it has impacted uh i'm sure that the work of the committee and all of our lives in the past year and a half uh obviously without talking about the nominations which you can probably not talk about uh have you seen um in the past year and a half research work applications maybe vaccines that when you see this and when you see read these papers you think ah this will maybe be a nobel prize in the future uh that may be a relevant question but it's not really how we work because we uh we perform our work originating from nominations so we're waiting for nominations and always when we get the nomination that is new to us we do a very thorough investigation but i mean of course big breakthroughs in medicine they usually reach us i'm not able to say more than that in this particular case is there anymore this one over here thank you i'm from nordic chinese times apart from applications to medicine and treatment i think this concept can also be used in a more futuristic setup as in vr or this metaverse concept that's been developing in the computer science community so i was wondering if that kind of application would also came into being one day so for virtual reality applications in computer world for example yeah i'll let the professor iron force somebody else i think that of course our um somatosensory system it's really uh critical for for uh everyday activities that we have that i tried to explain in our present in my presentation so i mean for example i don't know exactly what you were referring to but of course like if you have exoskeletons or you know new tools that need to be trained of course they have to perceive the same kind of information we do in order to to do to perform well so i'm not sure exactly how much of this year's price has been implemented and implemented in that area but certainly the same kinds of signals need to be registered and processed just like we do in the in in you know in our brain so i think that that surely there is a lot to learn by studying our physiology in terms of also applying that on for example exoskeletons or other ai pro learning processes okay let's see if there's there's one more here yeah yes there are some very rare medical conditions where patients don't register pain and and they can get in injuries very easily are these receptors um relevant for those medical conditions could i ask a professor paris wellington who is also a neurologist to respond to that question yes there is one gain of function mutation so you get an overstimulated a1 receptor and if you have that you develop something that is called a familial episodic pain syndrome and that can be triggered for example by cold or by stressors there is one familiar syndrome one should maybe you could mention something about potential drugs and drug development against pain yes so there are uh first of all capsizing itself is actually used in the clinics especially uh if you have had shingles and you get pain after that then capsizing is actually used in the clinics then there are also efforts to develop compounds that target trip v1 and also a1 especially against chronic pain there's one over there could we get the microphone hi i was wondering if um what are the papers or particular conferences perhaps that have played the the biggest role in guiding your decision do you work like that that you look at certain papers that have been published by the nobel laureates so if i'll try and answer that i mean we we always look at the most worthy candidates based on the discoveries that they have made and it's hard to say a particular type of investigation or obviously i mean scientific papers are crucial but it's it's not any particular type of journal we look everywhere and we do it extremely thoroughly which are the papers i see in in the in the press material you'll have actually eight articles that we mentioned particularly uh that that are crucial um that we we find are key uh to the discoveries this year so sorry i misunderstood your question i think it's easier if you look in the press material and you'll get it okay i don't see any more hands-on i know several ones interviews and if if you haven't announced a request for interview we'll try and help you anyway if we can so thank you very much for coming thanks we got it all thank you yes now oh uh two honestly professor abdel al mira a member of the nobel committee how would you summarize what this year's nobel prize was awarded for this nobel prize has been awarded for our ability to sense heat cold and touch and this nobel prize for the discovery is made in a way to discount to find the receptors that sense changes in temperature and also change when touch each other and get in contact with each other and receptor is a bit complicated a word if you were to explain the discovery to a child what would you say so when we are when there is a change in temperature there are sensors in our skin that are sensing these changes either when there is like a sunny a burning sun or if you are put your hand in a cold water those sensors are being activated and they are formed by this receptors that were discovered in addition when we touch each other there are other receptors that are activated and sense convert the touch into nerve signals sent to the brain how would you say does this discovery affect our lives without these channels we will not be able to protect ourselves if we put our hand in a burning when a fire this receptor send information to our brain and tell us to avoid touching a burning place in addition these are for the temperature sensing receptors the touch sensing receptors are also important for giving us information where our body parts are placed in space and without them we will not be able to stand we will not be able to touch and feel our surroundings and why is this discovery being awarded now recognized now sorry why is it recognized now this is a very the discovery has been made uh more than a decade these two discoveries were made more than a decade ago but it's probably just the right time for this discovery to be recognized because it has profoundly changed our view of how we sense the work around us um is this research in any way connected to helping us fight covet 19. well as you know during this is not directly related to kovit but as you know during the last year we have been socially distancing from each other we have missed the sense of touch the sense of the warmth that we give to each other like during a hug and during a hug when hugging each other these are the receptors that give us that feeling of the warmth and the the closeness to each other so if we turn to the laureates uh what can you tell us about the two laureates what can i tell about the lord yes what the laureates are very um established and fantastic researchers that have really transformed our view they have set up to really unlock one of the mysteries of nature in other words how what are the sensors that allow us to interact with the outside world and they have been working with really a lot of vision and hard work to be able to to make make these important discoveries and the name david julius what was his part of this work david julius was mostly interested in understanding how we sense the burning heat that is given by the chili pepper when we eat a hot uh a hot food for example and he found the receptor that is sensing this chili or capsaicin which is the active compound and he realized soon after when he discovered the receptor that the receptor also is sensing heat and it's a thermosensitive receptor wants to know which are the receptors that are allowing us to sense touch and mechanical change in the force on our body or our skin and then he was important we made the important discovery for uh finding the piezo channels and i understand that thomas perman has been able to get in touch with them what did they say when they got the call he just talked with them briefly because it was very hard to find and then they were basically overwhelmed and surprised by the fact that they were awarded this year nobel prize but they were of course delighted and happy and finally could you please in 30 seconds tell me why are you excited by this year's prize well this is one of the fundamental functions of our body and this is the way our nervous system gets to know what is happening in the outside world and this is how our what makes us basically who we are by transforming reacting to the outside environment and getting to adopt our behavior and also our interactions thank you very much thank you shoes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause]

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Length: 32min 37sec (1957 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021