08, Nov 2011

Just three days after he died of pancreatic cancer, Ralph M. Steinman—a professor of immunology at New York’s Rockefeller University—was named as a co-winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The other half of the prize was shared by Bruce A. Beutler––a professor of genetics and immunology at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California—and Jules A. Hoffmann—a researcher at France’s University of Strasbourg. Their work centered on the initial stages of the body’s immune response. Mr. Hoffmann and Dr. Beutler were cited for discovering the cell receptors that are triggered by invading organisms such as bacteria.

In 1973, Dr. Steinman was honored for his discovery of dendritic cells and related breakthroughs in how the body’s immune system identifies and fights off threats such as viruses and cancers.

Four years after receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer––a type of cancer that usually kills quickly, often within months––Dr. Steinman died at an age of 68. In a statement to the media, Rockefeller University said that Dr. Steinman’s life was extended using a dendritic-cell-based immunotherapy of his own design. “He was receiving a total of eight different experimental therapies, two of which included the use of his own dendritic cells,” reported a colleague at Rockefeller.

The Nobel is the latest and the most significant in a line of awards for Dr. Steinman, including the A. H. Heineken Prize for Medicine in 2010 and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 2007.

Dr. Steinman’s demise left the members of the Nobel awards panel at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute in a state of confusion and shock, given the fact that the rules of the prize prohibit posthumous awards. But after conferring on the matter, leaders of the Nobel Foundation confirmed later that the award to Dr. Steinman would stand, citing that the panel did not know of his death at the time its announcement. The prize money to be shared by the winners is worth nearly $1.5 million.

Dr. Steinman proposed  that dendritic cells––which he discovered––play a key role in activating the adaptive immune system, which is the second and slower-reacting of the body’s two key lines of immune defense. The first is known as the innate immune system.

Another colleague of Dr. Steinman’s, William G. Hawkins––an associate professor of surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine, in St. Louis––in his eulogy for Dr. Steinman, called him a valuable mentor to a generation of scientists.

“This is a man with strong beliefs who bet his life on immunotherapy,” Dr. Hawkins said. “Even in his death he continues to support this cause. His remarkable long survival suggests that there is hope in immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer patients.”