Bruce Beutler

Bruce Beutler is an American immunologist and geneticist who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jules Hoffmann for work on how innate immunity is activated, while the other half of the prize went to Ralph Steinman. Born in Chicago in 1957 and trained in medicine at the University of Chicago, he found the long-sought receptor for bacterial lipopolysaccharide by showing that mutations in the mouse Tlr4 gene explained why two strains of mice could not respond to it. Earlier, at Rockefeller University, he purified cachectin and recognised it as tumor necrosis factor, and later he and colleagues invented receptor-based molecules that neutralise that factor, a line of work behind the drug etanercept. He directs the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.