The 2011 Nobel Prize - Honoring the memory of Dr. Ralph Steinman

Abstract

A century ago the Nobel prize was awarded to Metchnikoff who discovered the phagocytosis, a process by which certain cells engulf and eventually destroy foreign molecules including bacteria. This year, the scientific community honored with the highest award, the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, Dr. Ralph Steinman of Rockefeller University, for the discovery of the dendritic cells in the early 70s while working as postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Zanvil Cohn’s laboratory at the same institution. Dr. Steinman shared this year’s Nobel prize with Dr. Bruce Beutler of the Scripps Research Institute andDr. Jules Hoffman for their pivotal contribution in understanding the innate immunity and its relationship with adaptive immunity, through discovery of dendritic cells and Toll-like receptors, respectively. Dendritic cells and Toll like receptors, together, represent a critical, early recognition mechanism and interface between the immune system and the potential pathogens. In fact, Toll like receptors expressed on dendritic cells and other cell types represent an ancient and conserved immune repertoire able to recognize and discriminate between different chemical classes of pathogen associated molecular patterns. Their downstream signaling leads to potent activation of pathways connected to immune enhancing cytokines and co-stimulatory molecules necessary to deploy a full blown immune response. Dendritic cells express Toll like receptors, thus having the capability to rapidly sense immunologic threats, but have two additional seminal properties: first, they have an extraordinary capability to survey anatomical interfaces between body and environment and secondly, they are the most potent antigen processing cells with key role in communicating epitope-related information and regulating the function of T cells as well as that of other types of cells. While these discoveries revolutionized the understanding of the immune system — with recent articles in our journal dedicated to both Toll like receptors and dendritic cells — they paved the way to very effervescent translational efforts spanning cancer immunotherapy, microbial vaccine design, autoimmunity and allergy alike. A resurgence of the immunotherapy field in cancer owes significantly to the contributions of Drs. Steinman, Beutler and Hoffman to this field.