Ardem Patapoutian
Molecular biologist, neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate 2021
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Early life
Patapoutian was born to a Lebanese Armenian family in Beirut, Lebanon. His father, Sarkis Patapoutian (better known by the pen name Sarkis Vahakn), is a poet and an accountant, while his mother, Haiguhi Adjemian, was the principal of an Armenian school in Beirut. He has a brother, Ara, and a sister, Houry. His grandparents settled in Lebanon from Hadjin after surviving the Armenian Genocide.
He is childhood friends with journalist and author Vicken Cheterian. He attended the Demirdjian and Hovagimian Armenian schools in Beirut. The Lebanese Civil War began when Patapoutian was 8 years old, and the conflict led many of his friends and neighbors to flee the country. By his freshman year of high school, Patapoutian was one of just five students in his grade.
Patapoutian enrolled at the American University of Beirut as a pre-med major for a year before he had a personal encounter with militants in the city. The militants captured Patapoutian as he was crossing from East to West Beirut and threatened to shoot him in the knee. Though they soon released him, Patapoutian called this experience "the final straw." In 1986, Patapoutian and his brother immigrated to the United States as refugees. Once in the United States, Patapoutian worked odd jobs, such as delivering pizzas and writing horoscopes for an Armenian newspaper, as he established residency in the state of California.
He received a B.S. degree in cell and developmental biology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990 and a PhD degree in biology from the California Institute of Technology in 1996 under direction of Barbara Wold.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Patapoutian worked with Louis F. Reichardt at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2000, he became an assistant professor at Scripps Research (then known as The Scripps Research Institute). Between 2000 and 2014, he had an additional research position for the Novartis Research Foundation. Since 2014, Patapoutian has been an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
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Personal life
Patapoutian, a naturalized U.S. citizen, lives in Del Mar, California with his wife Nancy Hong, a venture capitalist, and son, Luca.
Research
Patapoutian's research is into the biological receptors for temperature and touch (nociception). The knowledge is used to develop treatments for a range of diseases, including chronic pain. The discoveries made it possible to understand how heat, cold and mechanical forces trigger nerve impulses.
Patapoutian researches the signal transduction of sensors. Patapoutian and co-workers inactivated genes. In this way, they identified the gene, that made the cells insensitive for touch. The channel for the sense of touch was called PIEZO1 (transl. pressure). Through its similarity to PIEZO1, a second gene was discovered and named PIEZO2. This ion channel, the more important of the two mechanoreceptors, is essential for the sense of touch. PIEZO1 and PIEZO2 channels have been shown to regulate additional important physiological processes including blood pressure, respiration and urinary bladder control.
Patapoutian also made significant contributions to the identification of novel ion channels and receptors that are activated by temperature, mechanical forces or increased cell volume. Patapoutian and his collaborators were able to show that these ion channels play an outstanding role in the sensation of temperature, in the sensation of touch, in proprioception, in the sensation of pain and in the regulation of vascular tone. More recent work uses functional genomics techniques to identify and characterize mechanosensitive ion channels (mechanotransduction).