- Person
- David Julius
- Lived
- b. 1955
- Field
- Physiology, pain research
- From
- American
The story
David Julius was born in 1955 in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family from Russia. He studied at MIT and earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco in 1989, where he has spent decades studying how nerves sense the world.
Pain is the body's alarm system, yet how a nerve ending actually detects something harmful, such as scalding heat, was long a mystery. Julius approached it through a simple question: why does capsaicin, the chemical in chili peppers, produce a burning sensation?
His laboratory searched through genes from sensory neurons for one that made cells respond to capsaicin. Early attempts failed, but in 1997 the team identified a single gene that did the job. It encoded an ion channel, a tiny gate in the membrane of nerve cells, now called TRPV1. The team found that TRPV1 also opens in response to real heat above about 43 degrees Celsius. Mice lacking it lost their sensitivity to both capsaicin and painful heat. In other words, chili peppers feel hot because they trigger the same sensor that warns us of burns.
TRPV1 also helps explain why injured skin hurts so much. Inflammation makes the channel more sensitive, which is part of why sunburned skin can feel burning hot from a mild touch or warm water. Later, Julius and his UCSF colleague Yifan Cheng used cryo-electron microscopy to map TRPV1's structure in near-atomic detail, information intended to help design new drugs.
The discovery turned pain into something that could be studied at the level of individual molecules. It stimulated intense interest in TRP channels as targets for new painkillers, and many drugs that block TRPV1 have been developed and tested. Capsaicin itself is now used to relieve pain, in creams and in a high-strength skin patch that can ease pain for up to three months after a single application.
Julius has called chronic pain a largely unmet medical need, a problem made more urgent by the opioid epidemic. His hope, shared by many researchers, is that understanding pain's molecular sensors will lead to safe, targeted pain medicines that do not carry the risk of addiction.
Why it matters
The TRPV1 discovery gave researchers a precise target for treating pain, driving the search for non-addictive painkillers and informing capsaicin-based pain treatments used today.
About David Julius
Brooklyn-born physiologist who used chili pepper and menthol to find the body’s sensors for heat, cold and pain, opening a new path toward pain relief without opioids. Nobel Prize 2021.
More about David Julius
Sources
- Pain Researcher David Julius Wins 2020 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience University of California, San Francisco
- David Julius Wikipedia
- TRPV1 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.