In 1998, when Timothy Hla, Ph.D., and his colleagues identified and cloned the receptor for sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P), it generated a lot of excitement. S1P, a lipid originally discovered in the 1960s, was known to play various roles in the body and in disease. But it wasn’t thought that lipids could have receptors, and it wasn’t fully appreciated that they could send messages into cells.
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