Bruce Beutler

Bruce Alan Beutler ( BOYT-lər; born December 29, 1957) is an American immunologist and geneticist. Together with Jules A. Hoffmann, he received one-half of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for "discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity." Beutler discovered the long-elusive receptor for lipopolysaccharide (LPS; also known as endotoxin). He did so by identifying spontaneous mutations in the gene coding for mouse Toll-like receptor 4 (Tlr4) in two unrelated strains of LPS-refractory mice and proving they were responsible for that phenotype. Subsequently, and chiefly through the work of Shizuo Akira, other TLRs were shown to detect signature molecules of most infectious microbes, in each case triggering an innate immune response.

The other half of the Nobel Prize went to Ralph M. Steinman for "his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity."

Beutler is currently a Regental Professor and Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. In 2012, Beutler was appointed as an Honorary Professor in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin.