Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka of the United States won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for identifying a class of cell receptor, yielding vital insights into how the body works at the molecular level.

The big beneficiary of this fundamental work is medicine, the Nobel committee declared.

The pair were honoured for discovering a key component of cells called G-protein-coupled receptors and mapping how they work.

The receptors stud the surface of cells, sensitising them to light, flavour, smells and body chemicals such as adrenaline and enabling cells to communicate with each other.

About a thousand of these kinds of receptor are known to exist throughout the body. They are essential not just for physiological processes but also for response to drugs.

"About half of all medications achieve their effect through G-protein-coupled receptors," the Nobel jury said.

Understanding the receptors provides the tools for "better drugs with fewer side effects," Nobel committee member Sven Lidin said.

G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are known to influence everything from sight, smell and taste to blood pressure, pain tolerance and metabolism.

They tell the inside of cells about conditions on the outside of their protective plasma membranes, to which the cells can form a response -- communicating with each other and with the surrounding environment.

This explains how cardiac cells know to raise the heart rate when we are startled, for example.

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US pair share chemistry Nobel for cell receptors

Two U.S. scientists have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering a primary way the billions of cells in the body sense their environment, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today (Oct. 10).

In groundbreaking research, Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka figured out the inner workings of so-called G-proteincoupled receptors (GPCRs). These receptors, or tiny sensors on cells, interact with the fight-or-flight hormone adrenalin (also called epinephrine), dopamine, serotonin, light, flavor and odor.

In fact, in times of stress, a type of GPCR mediates the many effects of adrenaline, including dilation of pupils, constriction of blood vessels and heart-rate increase.

"The work of Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka has helped us to understand more fullyhow our cells react to external influences such as the hormone adrenalin," Martyn Poliakoff, foreign secretary and vice president of the Royal Society, said in a statement.

"Understanding how our bodies prepare for fight or flight is just one of the applications of their work, which has also opened the door for a wide range of new, more effective drug treatments with fewer side effects," Poliakoff added.

These receptors mediate the effects of about half of all medicines, including beta-blockers, antihistamines and several psychiatric medications. GCPRs are also quite complex, and so trying to image one of them seemed an elusive goal.

In 2011, Kobilka his research team did just that, capturing an image of one GCPR called -adrenergic receptor (it binds with the hormone adrenaline) just as it was activated by the hormone and sending a signal into the cell. "This image is a molecular masterpiece the result of decades of research," according to a statement on the Nobel Prize website. [In Photos: Nobel Prize Winners 2012]

When the Royal Society called to let Kobilka know of his award it was the middle of the night for him in California he missed it. Luckily, they called again, but even then Kobilka thought it was a prank. "I thought it was some friends initially. But I don't have friends with a really good Swedish accent so then I started believing it," he said during an interview with the Nobel Prize website.

Kobilka, of Stanford University School of Medicine, and Lefkowitz, of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Duke University Medical Center, will receive their Nobel Prizes on Dec. 10.

The Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine and in physics were announced Monday (Oct. 8) and Tuesday (Oct. 9), respectively; the Nobels in Literature and in Peace will be announced Thursday and Friday, respectively, with the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences to be announced Monday, Oct. 15.

Excerpt from:
2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awards Groundbreaking Cell Research

Two Americans are sharing this years Nobel Prize in chemistry for helping reveal the way that many hormones and neurotransmitters and hundreds of drugs communicate with the interior of cells.

The winners, Robert J. Lefkowitz, 69, of Duke University and Brian K. Kobilka, 57, of Stanford University, were teacher and student. Both are physicians and neither has a doctorate in chemistry.

Their research, conducted over four decades, has elucidated the workings of G-protein-coupled receptors, a family with about 1,000 varieties that are involved in everything from sight and smell to the regulation of pain and heart rate.

More than one-third of all drugs on the market including beta blockers, antihistamines and opioid painkillers operate through G-protein-coupled receptors. Work in the past few years that reveals receptor structure in atomic detail may eventually lead to drugs with more precise action and fewer side effects.

In making the announcement, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the pair had made groundbreaking discoveries and called Kobilkas success last year in crystallizing a receptor at the moment it is being activated a molecular masterpiece. The two will share about $1.2 million.

With its insights both crucial to understanding cell biology and highly useful to clinical medicine, a Nobel for this field had long been predicted.

This could have been a prize in physiology or medicine, but its the chemical nature of the changes [driven by the receptors] that is being recognized here, said Bassam Shakhashiri, president of the American Chemical Society and a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

At a news conference, Lefkowitz said he and Kobilka couldnt be more different. Lefkowitz is a voluble, Bronx-accented New Yorker; Kobilka is a taciturn, small-town Minnesotan. Lefkowitz said the two had talked by Skype earlier in the day, and Lefkowitz had said Kobilkas recent work is maybe what pushed this over the line into prize-winning territory. Kobilka demurred and said Lefkowitzs work is what made his achievement possible.

What little was said was really very moving, he told the news conference, his voice catching.

Lefkowitzs research has been supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, based in Chevy Chase, since 1976 longer than any other of the institutes fellows, he said.

See the original post:
Two Americans get chemistry Nobel for elucidating cellular receptors

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors, which are the portals by which information about the environment reaches the interior of cells and leads to their responses. About half of all drugs work by interacting with G-protein-coupled receptors

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The 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors, which are the portals by which information about the environment reaches the interior of cells and leads to their responses. About half of all drugs work by interacting with G-protein-coupled receptors.

The official Nobel Prize press release:

10 October 2012

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2012 to

Robert J. Lefkowitz Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA

and

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The 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The US scientists who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry were able to map how cells detect and respond to chemicals they encounter.

Two US researchers have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for uncovering and mapping a key mechanism used by cells to detect and respond to the presence of hormones and other chemicals they encounter, a mechanism seen as vital to the pharmaceutical industrys development of new drugs.

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The prize, which carries an 8 million krona ($1.2 million US) purse, was given to Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University in Durham, N.C., and the Maryland-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and to Brian Kobilka of Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

The two were awarded for work on a family of proteins embedded in cell walls that detect the presence of a hormone such as adrenaline outside a cell, then conduct that information through the cell wall to a protein switch inside that touches off a cell's response.

The cellular sensors, dubbed G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), help coordinate "an orchestrated response from billions of individual cells that make up our bodies" as the cells respond to an outside stimulus, said Sven Lindin, chairman of the committee awarding the chemistry prize. One such stimulus: the startling, raucous appearance of a ghoul at a Halloween haunted house.

The receptors have become prime targets for new drugs to treat a range of diseases, he added at a press conference on Wednesday announcing the award. By some estimates, roughly half of all the drugs used today rely on GCPRs as pathways for affecting the cells of interest. Armed with a knowledge of the receptor molecule's unique pattern of folds when it's triggered, he adds, pharmaceutical companies are working to develop new drugs that have fewer side effects.

The notion that cells must have some mechanism for sensing their environment emerged toward the end of the 1800s, researchers say, but no one succeeded in identifying the sensors cells use.

Indeed, "when I started doing my work 40 years ago, there was still huge skepticism as to whether things like receptors really existed even from some people who were central in pharmacology," said Dr. Lefkowitz in an interview for Nobel.org.

Read more:
Chemistry Nobel could lead to drugs with fewer side effects