Rita Levi-Montalcini opened the science of growth factors

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

The story

Before nerve growth factor, scientists had little idea how cells in the body tell each other when to grow, survive or die. Rita Levi-Montalcini's wartime experiments on chick embryos, carried out in a bedroom laboratory after Italy's race laws drove her from the university, had suggested that young nerve cells die unless they receive something from the tissue they connect to. At Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1950s she found that a mouse tumour released a substance that made nerves grow wildly, and in 1952 she confirmed it in tissue culture in Rio de Janeiro.

The biochemist Stanley Cohen then joined her to identify the substance. Using a clue from snake venom, which turned out to be rich in it, he traced it to mouse salivary glands and isolated the protein, which became known as nerve growth factor (NGF). Their work showed that messages telling cells to grow and survive are carried by specific molecules released by one tissue and received by another. NGF was one of the first such molecules ever described and is often regarded as the prototype of the whole class.

Cohen later isolated a second protein from mouse tissue that made the eyelids of newborn mice open early and their teeth come through sooner. It became known as epidermal growth factor, and researchers went on to find a large family of signalling proteins of this kind. Today hundreds of growth factors are known, and they affect almost every part of biology.

Recognition came over several decades. Levi-Montalcini and Cohen received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University in 1983. In 1986 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of growth factors, and the same year she received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. In 1987 she was awarded the US National Medal of Science.

Growth factors are now central to understanding cancer, in which cells escape the normal controls on their growth, and Cohen's work on them proved fundamental to the design of anti-cancer drugs. NGF itself has given scientists new ways to study nerve growth and to look for treatments for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

Why it matters

Drugs that block growth-factor signalling are now standard cancer treatments, and growth factors are studied as therapies for nerve damage and neurodegenerative disease.

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.

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Rita Levi-Montalcini

1909–2012 · Neurobiology

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