- Person
- Bruce Beutler
- Lived
- b. 1957
- Field
- Immunology and genetics
- From
- American
The story
Bruce Beutler was born in Chicago in 1957 to a Jewish family; all four of his grandparents had come to America to escape persecution as Jews, his father's parents fleeing Nazi Berlin in 1935. Trained as a physician at the University of Chicago, he joined Rockefeller University in New York in 1983 to study cachectin, a substance released by immune cells when they meet bacterial toxins.
Within a year Beutler had purified cachectin for the first time and shown that antibodies against it protected mice from lethal doses of bacterial endotoxin. He then found that cachectin was the mouse version of tumour necrosis factor, or TNF, a protein then being studied as a possible cancer treatment. His work showed that TNF is above all a powerful driver of inflammation, and that blocking it could be valuable.
After moving to UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in 1986, Beutler set out to make a molecule that could block TNF in the body for long periods. His student David Crawford and postdoctoral fellow Karsten Peppel joined the TNF-binding part of a TNF receptor to part of an antibody. The hybrid protein was stable, did not provoke an immune reaction and neutralised TNF extremely potently.
Beutler and his colleagues patented the protein and licensed it in 1995 to the biotechnology company Immunex, later acquired by Amgen. Under the name etanercept, sold as Enbrel, it was approved in the United States in November 1998 for moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis. Approvals followed for juvenile arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, plaque psoriasis and ankylosing spondylitis. Etanercept is listed as an alternative on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, and lower-cost biosimilar versions are now sold in many countries.
Beutler went on to discover in 1998 how the body senses bacterial endotoxin, work for which he shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But the TNF blocker his lab built is the part of his work that patients feel most directly.
Why it matters
Etanercept and other TNF blockers have relieved pain and prevented joint damage for large numbers of people with rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and related inflammatory diseases.
About Bruce Beutler
Grandson of Jewish refugees who isolated the inflammatory protein TNF, created the TNF blocker that became the arthritis drug Enbrel, and found how the body detects bacteria. Nobel Prize 2011.
More about Bruce Beutler
Sources
- Bruce A. Beutler, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Etanercept Wikipedia
- Bruce Beutler Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.