Ralph M. Steinman’s run of luck finally ran out, but his run of top medical prizes did not.
Just three days after he died of pancreatic cancer, in a battle extended by his own research breakthroughs, Dr. Steinman, a professor of immunology at New York’s Rockefeller University, was named on Monday as a co-winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Dr. Steinman was honored for his discovery, in 1973, of dendritic cells and related breakthroughs in how the body’s immune system identifies and fights off threats such as viruses and cancers.
The other half of the prize was shared by Bruce A. Beutler, a professor of genetics and immunology at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, Calif., and Jules A. Hoffmann, a researcher at France’s University of Strasbourg, whose work centered on the initial stages of the body’s immune response.
Dr. Steinman died at age 68, four years after receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, a type of cancer that usually kills quickly, often within months. Rockefeller University said in a statement that Dr. Steinman’s life “was extended using a dendritic-cell-based immunotherapy of his own design.” He was receiving a total of eight different experimental therapies, two of which included the use of his own dendritic cells, according to a colleague at Rockefeller.
The Nobel is the latest and the most significant in a line of awards for Dr. Steinman, including the A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine in 2010 and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 2007.
Dr. Steinman’s death came as a surprise to the Nobel awards panel at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, as the rules of the prize prohibit posthumous awards. After conferring on the matter, leaders of the Nobel Foundation confirmed later Monday that the award to Dr. Steinman would stand, given that the panel did not know of his death at the time it announced his selection.
The prize money to be shared by the winners is worth nearly $1.5-million.
Mr. Hoffmann and Dr. Beutler were cited for discovering the cell receptors that are triggered by invading organisms such as bacteria. Dr. Steinman established that dendritic cells, which he discovered, play a central role in activating the adaptive immune system, which is the second and slower-reacting of the body’s two key lines of immune defense. The first is known as the innate immune system.
Another colleague of Dr. Steinman’s, William G. Hawkins, an associate professor of surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine, in St. Louis, called the late laureate a valuable mentor to a generation of scientists.
“This is a man with strong beliefs who bet his life on immunotherapy,” Dr. Hawkins said. “Even in his death he continues to support this cause. His exceptionally long survival suggests that there is hope in immunotherapy for pancreas-cancer patients.”
