David Julius

University of California, San Francisco

David Julius is an American physiologist and chair of the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, who shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Ardem Patapoutian for discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch. Using capsaicin, the pungent compound in chili peppers, as a molecular probe, Julius cloned TRPV1, the heat- and pain-sensing ion channel that responds to noxious temperatures and inflammatory signals, and later identified TRPM8, the receptor activated by cold and menthol. This body of work revealed the molecular logic of how the somatosensory system detects temperature and chemical irritants, and established the transient receptor potential (TRP) channel family as central players in nociception and chronic pain. Trained at MIT and UC Berkeley with postdoctoral work at Columbia, Julius received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2020 before the Nobel, along with the Shaw Prize and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. A defining strand of his program exploited natural toxins as pharmacological keys: tarantula and coral-snake venom peptides, along with the wasabi irritant allyl isothiocyanate acting through TRPA1, let his group map the structural sites where these channels open, work later visualized through near-atomic cryo-electron microscopy structures of TRPV1 captured in distinct gating states. By showing that a single receptor integrates thermal, chemical, and inflammatory cues, Julius reframed pain as a process amenable to receptor-level intervention, motivating TRPV1 antagonist and agonist programs in the clinic, including capsaicin-based and resiniferatoxin-based approaches to intractable pain. His ongoing comparative physiology, spanning vampire bats, rattlesnakes, and other species with specialized heat-sensing, continues to reveal how the same molecular toolkit is tuned across evolution to serve radically different sensory needs.