E-Mail
Credit: BBVA Foundation
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine has gone in this thirteenth edition to David Julius, from the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, from the Scripps Institute, La Jolla (United States), for identifying the receptors that enable us to sense temperature, pain and pressure. Temperature, pain and pressure are part of our sense of touch, perhaps the least understood of the five main senses of humans, read the opening words of the citation. Julius and Patapoutian provided a molecular and neural basis for thermosensation and mechanosensation.
This line of research holds out exciting medical possibilities, because it sheds light on how to reduce chronic and acute pain associated with a range of diseases, trauma and their treatments. In fact, several pharmaceutical laboratories are working to identify molecules that act on these receptors with the aim of treating different fo