Medicine Nobel Prize awards peripheral research of immune tolerance: NPR

Stockholm – Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi won the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

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

Peripheral immune tolerance is a way in which the body helps prevent the immune system from unleashing and attacking its own tissues instead of foreign invaders.

Their work dates back to 1995, when Sakaguchi made the first key discovery. Brunkow and Ramsdell made another breakthrough in 2001 and Sakaguchi linked all their work two years later.

“The discoveries of the winners have launched the field of peripheral tolerance, stimulating the development of medical treatment for cancer and autoimmune diseases,” the Nobel assembly said in a press release. “This can also lead to more successful transplants. Several of these treatments are now undergoing clinical trials.”

Thomas Perlmann, secretary general of the Nobel Committee, said that he could only join Sakaguchi by phone on Monday morning. He left vocal messages for Brunkow and Ramsdell.

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.

Last year’s prize was shared by Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microarn, tiny pieces of genetic material that serve as switches inside and inside the cells that help control what cells do and when they do it.

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.