Rita Levi-Montalcini spotlit mast cells in disease

Person: Rita Levi-Montalcini
Lived: 1909–2012
Field: Neurobiology
From: Italian

The story

Rita Levi-Montalcini never stopped working. Her discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF) at Washington University in St. Louis, for which she shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Stanley Cohen, had shown how a single protein can tell nerve cells to grow and survive. In later decades her research group in Rome went further, showing that NGF also acts on the immune and hormone systems, and that these systems are linked to the nervous system in ways few had suspected.

That line of work led her in the 1990s, by then in her eighties, to mast cells. These immune cells, first described by Friedrich von Recklinghausen in 1863 and named by Paul Ehrlich in 1877, live in connective and mucosal tissues and are packed with granules of chemicals such as histamine and heparin. When they sense danger, they release these substances along with other signalling molecules, among them NGF itself.

She was one of the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human disease. In 1993 her group identified palmitoylethanolamide, a fatty substance the body makes for itself, as an important natural modulator of mast cell activity. Understanding this mechanism started a new wave of research into the compound, which has added to scientists' knowledge of the body's endocannabinoid system and led to new formulations of palmitoylethanolamide.

This later work showed the breadth of her curiosity. A scientist who had begun with chick embryos in a bedroom laboratory during the Second World War was still opening new lines of inquiry more than half a century later, at an age when most researchers have long since retired.

Mast cells are now recognised as sentinels of the immune system. They help defend the body and repair tissue, but they are also central to allergy, anaphylaxis and atopic dermatitis and may be involved in a variety of other diseases. They remain an active field of medical research, and the link she drew between nerves, immunity and inflammation continues to shape how scientists think about them.

Why it matters

Her attention to mast cells, and to a natural molecule that modulates them, helped draw researchers toward a cell type now recognised as central to allergy and inflammation.

About Rita Levi-Montalcini

Italian-Jewish neuroscientist who, barred by Mussolini’s race laws, ran a secret lab in her bedroom, and later discovered nerve growth factor, winning the 1986 Nobel Prize.

Read the full profile

Rita Levi-Montalcini

1909–2012 · Neurobiology

View profile →