Nobel Prize In Medicine Awarded To Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell & Shimon Sakaguchi
Immune system breakthrough wins Nobel medicine prize for US, Japan scientists
STOCKHOLM, Oct 6 (Reuters) - American scientists Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi from Japan won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells, creating openings for possible new autoimmune disease and cancer treatments.
Their discoveries relate to peripheral immune tolerance, or "how we keep our immune system under control so we can fight all imaginable microbes and still avoid autoimmune disease", said Marie Wahren-Herlenius, a rheumatology professor at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, the awarding body.
The institute said all three laureates brought to the fore so-called regulatory T cells, a class of white blood cells that act as the immune system's security guards that keep immune cells from attacking our own body.
RESEARCH INTO WHAT STOPS IMMUNE SYSTEM ATTACKING ITSELF
Brunkow, who found out she had won after being woken by her dog barking at a news photographer on the front porch of her Seattle home, said she, Ramsdell and their colleagues had isolated a gene called FOXP3 that could be used as a marker for the cells.
"They're rare, but powerful, and they're critical for sort of dampening an immune response," she said in an interview, describing the cells as a braking system that prevents the body's immune system from tipping over into attacking itself.