Bruce A. Beutler, MD

2011 Nobel Prize
in Physiology or Medicine

Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense,
UT Southwestern Medical Center

Member, National Academy of Sciences

Member, Institute of Medicine

Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Member, EMBO

Member, German Academy of Sciences

Bruce A. Beutler, MD and Jules A. Hoffmann of Strasbourg University in France shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity,” the first step in the body’s immune response. The late Dr. Ralph M. Steinman of Rockefeller University in New York was also honored in 2011.

Dr. Beutler has studied innate immunity since the early 1980s. During a brief fellowship and faculty appointment at Rockefeller University, he isolated tumor necrosis factor (TNF), and identified it as one of the most important mediators of LPS-induced inflammation. He then returned to UT Southwestern as a faculty member and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator from 1986 to 2000.

His seminal work during this period was broadly relevant to host responses to viral infection, cancer, and autoimmunity, and ultimately led to the Nobel Prize. He developed recombinant inhibitors of TNF that have since been used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases. And he positionally cloned the receptor for LPS, thereby revealing the Toll like receptors as sensors of conserved molecules of microbial origin.

Between 2000 and 2011, Dr. Beutler worked at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He pioneered the use of random germline mutagenesis to dissect TLR signaling pathways, and during that period identified mutations in 20 genes critical for this process. Since 2011, he has resumed his work at UT Southwestern Medical center, where he established one of the largest mouse mutagenesis programs in the world: the only such program capable of identifying causative mutations in real time. He and his group have identified several hundred mutations that cause abnormalities in mice. Many of these mutations have important implications in infectious diseases or autoimmune conditions. Dr. Beutler’s team also has catalogued over a quarter of a million other mutations that change coding sense in the mouse, stored in an archive that eventually will encompass all mouse genes.

Dr. Beutler, a Regental Professor at UT Southwestern who holds the Raymond and Ellen Willie Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research, in Honor of Laverne and Raymond Willie Sr., earned his medical degree from the University of Chicago after graduating from the University of California, San Diego. His postgraduate career at UT Southwestern included an internal medicine internship and neurology residency.