Jules Hoffmann

University of Strasbourg / CNRS

Jules Alphonse Hoffmann is a Luxembourgish-French biologist and member of the Académie des Sciences who, while working at the University of Strasbourg and CNRS, made the seminal discovery that Toll receptors in Drosophila are essential for antifungal innate immunity. His 1996 paper demonstrated that flies lacking the Toll signaling pathway were unable to resist fungal infections, establishing that Toll acts as a pattern recognition receptor triggering innate defense. This discovery, combined with Charles Janeway's theoretical framework and Bruce Beutler's identification of TLR4 in mice, founded the modern field of innate immunity. Hoffmann shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bruce Beutler and Ralph Steinman. Understanding Toll-like receptor signaling has transformed the development of adjuvants for vaccines, the treatment of sepsis, and approaches to inflammatory diseases, making it one of the most clinically impactful discoveries in immunology in recent decades.