Molecular pain and the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

As a pain researcher, I have sometimes brought up a topic to discuss with my pain research friends about whether the Nobel Prize may someday go to a pain researcher. Professor Megumu Yoshimura, one of the best spinal cord electrophysiologists in our time and former founding executive editor of Molecular Pain, always has kept the faith for this. For years, many of us have been skeptical about this possibility, but the answer ‘YES' was given to the whole world on 4 October 2021. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is shared by Drs David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, two outstanding scientists whom I classify as Molecular Pain researchers, for discovering the molecular basis of how temperature and touch sensations are initiated at afferent nerve terminals under the skin. I call both of them Molecular Pain researchers because their studies and discoveries have provided profound insights into molecular mechanisms of pain under both physiological and pathological conditions. On behalf of the Molecular Pain Editorial Board, I would like to congratulate both Drs Julius and Patapoutian for receiving this highest award in Science and Research. It is particularly worth mentioning that Ardem was one of the founding editorial board members of Molecular Pain who have been supporting the journal since it was launched at the beginning of 2005.

Molecular Pain was started 16 years ago, partially due to a need for a research forum for those not quite well classified as pain researchers in classical terms. Among those non-classical pain researchers were Drs Julius, Patapoutian, members of the Molecular Pain editorial board, and many others. Of course, Min Zhuo and I were also among this list and strongly felt a need to create a new journal for researchers in Molecular Pain. The cloning of the capsaicin receptor, a heat-activated ion channel in the pain pathway, by Julius’s group in 1997 is a milestone in sensory physiology and pain research. ¹ This led the emerging field of Molecular Pain to focus on cellular and molecular mechanisms of pain. Michael Caterina, who made a key contribution to the work of the discovery of the capsaicin receptor (or TRPV1 channel) in Julius’s lab, was one of the founding executive editors of Molecular Pain. Michael has dedicated tremendous efforts to Molecular Pain and has also helped recruit a number of new and talented editorial members.

I got to know Ardem and his research after reading his seminal research article on cold temperature-sensing receptor TRPM8 published in Cell in 2002. ² In the same year, Julius’s group also published a paper on TRPM8 in cold-sensing in Nature. ³ I invited Ardem to join the Molecular Pain editorial board in 2004 before Molecular Pain was launched in 2005. He immediately accepted my invitation and became one of the founding members of Molecular Pain. He served the Molecular Pain editorial board for over 10 years. Here, on behalf of the entire Molecular Pain editorial board, I would like to thank him again for his contributing support to Molecular Pain.

In 2010, Ardem led his group to make a groundbreaking discovery by cloning and identifying Piezo channels as mechanoreceptors in mammals. ⁴ While Piezo2 channels were found to be expressed in many somatosensory neurons in this seminal study, it was not initially known whether these channels were involved in the initiation of touch sensation. This puzzle was solved in the spring of 2014 when three papers, one from my lab published in Cell, ⁵ and two from Ardem’s group and Ellen Lumpkin’s group both published in Nature,^6,7 provided direct evidence demonstrating that Piezo2 channels were involved in the transduction of touch stimuli into afferent impulses at the Merkel disc tactile end organs. As a Molecular Pain researcher, I feel very lucky to be a colleague in the same research field with Ardem, working on cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the sense of touch. I sincerely give my personal congratulations to Ardem for being awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. I also wish for Molecular Pain to gain more support from talented scientists around the world.