Tamas Bartfai (born 5 July 1948), is a Hungarian neuroscientist with interests in neurotransmission, neuropeptides, prostaglandins, fever, and drug discovery.
He succeeded to the Berzelius chair the Nobel Laureate Bengt I. Samuelsson at the Karolinska Institute, and Floyd E. Bloom at Scripps.
Between these appointments he was Senior VP for Central Nervous System Research at Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland.
In 2013, his accomplishments were celebrated with a rare symposium his honour at the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences (Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien) entitled "Frontiers in Neurochemistry".
Bartfai is an expert on the detection, destruction and decontamination of chemical and biological weapons, and the immediate treatment of radiation exposure.
It broke the dogma that all mammals have a 36.7 °C core body temperature and only for short periods of fever or hypothermia in surgery can this be changed.
This small but life-long hypothermia shows that the dogma is wrong and that these are healthy, fertile, normal-weight animals, who live about 25 percent longer than wild-type littermates.
[14] The discovery of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors in the brain (simultaneously with Sir Arnold Burgen and Solomon H. Snyder, 1973) earned Bartfai the Svedberg prize in 1985.
Most Alzheimer's disease symptom-modifying drugs are still aimed at increasing muscarinic acetylcholine receptor stimulation in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus.
Research on the coexistence of classical transmitters and neuropeptides,[16] and frequency-dependent chemical coding led to Bartfai receiving the 1992 Eriksson prize shared with Håkan Persson, who discovered brain derived neurotrophic factor.
Bartfai showed with Tomas Hökfelt, Marianne Schultzberg, and Jan M. Lundberg firstly that acetylcholine and vasoactive intestinal peptide can coexist in nerve terminals and act synergistically when released.
Bartfai's group showed interleukin-1, then called the endogenous pyrogen, is released from the adrenal medulla and brain and demonstrated that the endogenous pyrogen can control body temperature by acting at receptors and hyperpolarizing hypothalamic gabaergic interneurons that control thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue, and thus core body temperature and the fever response.,[18][19] Bartfai has published two books with Graham Lees, Ph.D., on drug discovery and development: "Drug Discovery: from bedside to Wall Street"[20] and "The Future of Drug Discovery: who decides which diseases to treat?