3 Scientists win the Nobel Prize in Medicine for Immunology Discoveries

Stockholm – 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 main program director at the Seattle Systems Biology Institute. Ramsdell, 64, is a scientific advisor for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco. Sakaguchi, 74, is a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at the University of Osaka in Japan.

Brunkow learned of his price from a photographer AP who came to her house in the early hours of the morning.

She said she had ignored the previous call of the Nobel Committee. “My phone has sounded and I saw a Sweden number and I thought:” It’s just, it’s a spam in a way. “”

“When I told Mary that she had won, she said,” Don’t be ridiculous “,” said her husband, Ross Colquhoun.

“It was a nice surprise,” said Sakaguchi at a press conference at the University of Osaka in western Japan. “I hope that research on the field will progress for more progress so that our results can be used in treatment, and I hope that we can also contribute to it.”

The immune system has many systems overlapping to detect and fight against bacteria, viruses and other bad players. The keys to immune warriors such as T cells are trained on how to identify bad actors. If some go rather in a bad way in a way that could trigger autoimmune diseases, they are supposed to be eliminated in the thymus -a process called central tolerance.

Nobel winners have unplugged an additional means for the body to keep the system in check.

The Nobel Committee said that it had started with the discovery of Sakaguchi in 1995 of a subtype of unknown T cells now known as regulatory T cells or REG. Then in 2001, Brunkow and Ramsdell discovered a guilty mutation in a gene named Foxp3, a gene that also plays a role in a rare human autoimmune disease.

The Nobel Committee said that two years later, Sakaguchi linked the discoveries to show that the FoxP3 gene controls the development of these T -regs – which in turn act as a security guard to find and limit other forms of T cells which react excessively.

Brunkow said that she and Ramsdell worked together in a small biotechnology business and that they studied why a particular mouse strain had a too active immune system. They had to work with new techniques to find the mouse gene behind the problem – but quickly realized that it could also be a major player in human health.

“From a DNA level, it was a really low alteration that caused this massive change in the functioning of the immune system.”

The work has opened a new field of immunology, said Marie Wahren-Herlenius, rheumatology professor at the Karolinska Institute. Researchers from around the world are now working to use regulatory T cells to develop treatments for autoimmune diseases and cancer.

“Their discoveries were decisive for our understanding of the functioning of the immune system and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases,” said Olle Kämpe, president of the Nobel Committee.

The prize is the first of the announcements of the Nobel Prize 2025 and was announced by a panel from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Nobel ads continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Nobel Memorial in economics prize on October 13.

The award ceremony will take place on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, which founded the awards. Nobel was a rich Swedish industrialist and the inventor of the dynamite. He died in 1896.

The trio will share the price of 11 million Swedish Kronor (nearly $ 1.2 million).