Nobel winner dies before learning of prize

The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday for key discoveries on the immune system. However, one of the three recipients died Friday of pancreatic cancer -- after the Nobel Committee had reached its decision but before announcing it.

Nobel prizes are not given posthumously. Thus, the death of Dr. Ralph Steinman, 68, of Rockefeller University in New York, complicates the Nobel Foundation’s decision. It’s not yet clear how the foundation will proceed.

Steinman joined Dr. Bruce A. Beutler, of the University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center, and Jules A. Hoffmann, of Strasbourgh University in France, as the 2011 winners for their various advances in understanding the workings of the immune system. Steinman discovered dendritic cells, powerful immune system cells that activate a stage of the immune response when invading foreign substances are cleared from the body.

Beutler was honored for his work in mice that identified a receptor, called lipopolysaccharide, that results in activation of the body’s inflammatory response and that can result in septic shock when amounts are extremely high. Beutler made his discovery at the University of Texas and then moved in 2000 to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. He recently returned to UT Southwestern.

Hoffman found that fruit flies with certain gene mutations were unable to produce a healthy immune response.

The three men’s research “has opened up new avenues for the development of prevention and therapy against infections, cancer and inflammatory diseases,” the Nobel Committee stated in a news release.

Additional Nobel Prizes will be awarded later this week.

Return to Booster Shots blog.

Follow me: twitter.com/LATShariRoan