Two Americans win Nobel Prize for potential pain treatment breakthrough

Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee: “The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute, has today decided to award the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.”

“I think it’s incredibly exciting. It concerns one of our senses and we all know, you know, how important it is to sense our surroundings for our survival. And this is a sense that, like the other ones, are absolutely crucial for us to survive. So we in the committee and assembly, we find this to be incredibly exciting.”

“First of all, it’s a basic research discovery of importance for physiology. But I mean, as always, with these basic big leaps, it is definitely very relevant for medicine. And for example, I mean, pain, that is very closely connected to the sense of temperature and touch. And we know that these systems are for sure involved in pain transduction. And there is also an activity, quite intense activity at certain places and in some companies to develop new drugs that could play a role in pain, chronic pain, for example.”

David Julius, 2021 Nobel Laureate in Medicine: “I was asleep and my phone sort of bleeped and it was from a relative who had been contacted by somebody on the Nobel committee trying to find my phone number and I thought it was sort of a prank. But anyway, it followed from there and it was just a few minutes before the announcement. So I think they were trying to find me.”

“You know, pretty astounded, I would say. It’s, you know, there’s so many great scientists out there and so many amazing discoveries that, you know, what are the chances? Because there are so many great things happening in terms of discovery and so, you know, when you get the call, you think, wow, they chose me and Ardem and I, you know, it’s it’s great for the field. It’s great for our institution, University of California, it’s great for people in my lab and everyone I’ve worked with and collaborators, so that’s really the wonderful part of it.”

“We know a lot about various senses like vision and hearing. I think the sense of touch and pain really sort of was somewhat enigmatic, even among all the senses and so, you know, I think the work that my lab has done, that Ardem’s lab has done, really sort of provided the molecular tools to really understand the sense of touch in detail and what that does from a translational point of view or potentially clinical point of view is to lead to the discovery of new targets and molecules for developing new types of analgesic drugs.”

“It goes in depth to understand things that most of us take for granted and I think that’s really true with sensations, especially with touch, it’s like we all know that we touch things hot and cold, we eat chilli peppers and menthol, but oftentimes you don’t think about how that works and there must be some underlying biology to that. So yeah, when you work on these things, or even when you read about them and our colleagues read about them, I think people do think about it differently because they realise that there’s a really precise mechanism by which these things work. It’s not just some sort of ethereal, you know, process that happens.”