Nobel Prize in medicine goes to scientists for work on human immune system


By KOSTYA MANENKOV, STEFANIE DAZIO and LAURAN NEERGAARD, Associated Press

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

Brunkow, 64, is a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Ramsdell, 64, is a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco. Sakaguchi, 74, is a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan.

The immune system has many overlapping systems to detect and fight bacteria, viruses and other bad actors. Key immune warriors such as T cells get trained on how to spot bad actors. If some instead go awry in a way that might trigger autoimmune diseases, they’re supposed to be eliminated in the thymus — a process called central tolerance.

A screen showing the photos of Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, at the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institutet, in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday, Oct. 6, 2025. (Claudio Bresciani/TT News Agency via AP)

The Nobel winners unraveled an additional way the body keeps the system in check.

The Nobel Committee said it started with Sakaguchi’s discovery in 1995 of a previously unknown T cell subtype now known as regulatory T cells or T-regs.

Then in 2001, Brunkow and Ramsdell discovered a culprit mutation in a gene named Foxp3, a gene that also plays a role in a rare human autoimmune disease.



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