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2011 Nobel, Round 1: Medicine

Three scientists have been bestowed the Nobel Prize in medicine for revolutionizing “our understanding of the immune system by discovering key principles for its activation,” the Nobel Assembly "announced":http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes...

Three scientists have been bestowed the Nobel Prize in medicine for revolutionizing "our understanding of the immune system by discovering key principles for its activation," the Nobel Assembly announced earlier today. This marks the first in a week of prizes, including physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

Prizes went jointly to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffman and also posthumously to Ralph M. Steinman. (Steinman died this weekend after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer, according to the Rockefeller University newswire.) Beutler and Hoffman were awarded for discovering receptor proteins that pinpoint harmful microorganisms and trigger innate immunity, the body's first immune response phase, and Steinman for discovering the immune system's dendritic cells along with their unique ability to trigger and govern adaptive immunity, a later phase of immune defense when microorganisms are purged from the body.

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Steinman's life was extended considerably via "dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design," Rockefeller's obituary adds.

Together, their discoveries shine a light on how innate and adaptive phases of immune response are spurred. As such, their work provides "novel insights" into disease mechanisms and opens doors to prevention development and new therapies for infections, cancers and inflammatory diseases.

According to the committee:

The components of the immune system have been identified step by step during the 20th century. Thanks to a series of discoveries awarded the Nobel Prize, we know, for instance, how antibodies are constructed and how T cells recognize foreign substances. However, until the work of Beutler, Hoffmann and Steinman, the mechanisms triggering the activation of innate immunity and mediating the communication between innate and adaptive immunity remained enigmatic.

Reuters reports that Beutler and Hoffman will split one half of the $10 million Swedish crown ($1.46 million USD) prize. No word yet on how Steinman's half will be doled.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv.

Image: University of South Carolina School of Medicine