Bruce Beutler

Bruce Alan Beutler 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 by identifying spontaneous mutations in the gene coding for the mouse Toll-like receptor 4 in two unrelated strains of LPS-refractory mice and proving they were responsible for that phenotype, work that led to the finding that other Toll-like receptors detect signature molecules of most infectious microbes and trigger an innate immune response.