Americans Robert Lefkowitz, a professor at Duke University, and Brian Kobilka have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The two were cited for studies of proteins that let body cells respond to signals from the outside.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Wednesday they had made groundbreaking discoveries on an important family of receptors, known as G-protein-coupled receptors.

About half of all medications act on these receptors, so learning about them will help scientists to come up with better drugs.

Lefkowitz was born in 1943 in New York, NY. He earned his medical degree in 1966 at Columbia University.

At Duke, Lefkowitz is a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He also is James B. Duke Professor of Medicine, and Professor of Biochemistry.

His research “continuously renews itself and always feels fresh,” Lefkowitz says at his Duke website. “I come to work every day with a sense of great anticipation and curiosity about what new discoveries and insights will come our way. Every question that we can answer poses several new ones that seem even more interesting than the one we’ve just answered.”

His biography at Duke notes that Lefkowitz didn’t plan to be a researcher.

“Surprisingly, Lefkowitz never fully intended to make research the focus of his career,” his biography reads.

“As a child growing up in the Bronx, he read medical fiction and detective stories, and decided in third grade that he wanted to become a physician. He went to medical school at Columbia University, finishing first in his class. But during a two-year fellowship at the National Institutes of Health from 1968–70, he got hooked on receptor biology, a field that was then in its infancy.”

Kobilka was born in 1955 in Little Falls, Minn. He earned his medical degree in 1981 at Yale University and currently is Professor of Medicine, and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford.

The Nobel week started Monday with the medicine prize going to stem cell pioneers John Gurdon of Britain and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka. Frenchman Serge Haroche and American David Wineland won the physics prize Tuesday for work on quantum particles.

The Nobel Prizes were established in the 1895 will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Each award is worth 8 million kronor, or about $1.2 million.

“Crucial” Studies

The Academy’s statement about the work of Lefkowitz and Kobilka:

“Your body is a fine-tuned system of interactions between billions of cells. Each cell has tiny receptors that enable it to sense its environment, so it can adapt to new situtations. Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka are awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family of such receptors: G-protein–coupled receptors.

“For a long time, it remained a mystery how cells could sense their environment. Scientists knew that hormones such as adrenalin had powerful effects: increasing blood pressure and making the heart beat faster. They suspected that cell surfaces contained some kind of recipient for hormones. But what these receptors actually consisted of and how they worked remained obscured for most of the 20th Century.

“Lefkowitz started to use radioactivity in 1968 in order to trace cells’ receptors. He attached an iodine isotope to various hormones, and thanks to the radiation, he managed to unveil several receptors, among those a receptor for adrenalin: β-adrenergic receptor. His team of researchers extracted the receptor from its hiding place in the cell wall and gained an initial understanding of how it works.

“The team achieved its next big step during the 1980s. The newly recruited Kobilka accepted the challenge to isolate the gene that codes for the β-adrenergic receptor from the gigantic human genome. His creative approach allowed him to attain his goal. When the researchers analyzed the gene, they discovered that the receptor was similar to one in the eye that captures
light. They realized that there is a whole family of receptors that look alike and function in the same manner.Today this family is referred to as G-protein–coupled receptors. About a thousand genes code for such receptors, for example, for light, flavour, odour, adrenalin, histamine, dopamine and serotonin. About half of all medications achieve their effect through G-protein–
coupled receptors.

“The studies by Lefkowitz and Kobilka are crucial for understanding how G-protein–coupled receptors function.

“Furthermore, in 2011, Kobilka achieved another breakthrough; he and his research team captured an image of the β-adrenergic receptor at the exact moment that it is activated by a hormone and sends a signal into the cell. This image is a molecular masterpiece – the result of decades of research.”