New Delhi, Oct 6 (UNI) The Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to three scientists including two from the United States and one from Japan for discovering how the immune system is kept in check, the Nobel Committee announced today.
Mary E. Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, Fred Ramsdell of the Sonoma Biotherapeutics, San Francisco and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, were awarded the Nobel Prize for their ‘’discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. They discovered how the immune system is kept in check,’’ the Nobel Committee said in a statement.
The body’s powerful immune system must be regulated, or it may attack our own organs, it said.
Every day the immune system protects from thousands of different microbes trying to invade human bodies. These all have different appearances and many have developed similarities with human cells as a form of camouflage. So how does the immune system determine what it should attack and what it should defend?
The laureates identified the immune system’s security guards, regulatory T cells, which prevent immune cells from attacking our own body.
“Their discoveries have been decisive for our understanding of how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases,” says Olle Kämpe, chair of the Nobel Committee.
Shimon Sakaguchi was swimming against the tide in 1995 when he made the first key discovery. At the time, many researchers were convinced that immune tolerance only developed due to potentially harmful immune cells being eliminated in the thymus through a process called central tolerance. Sakaguchi showed that the immune system is more complex and discovered a previously unknown class of immune cells, which protect the body from autoimmune diseases.
Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell made the other key discovery in 2001, when they presented the explanation for why a specific mouse strain was particularly vulnerable to autoimmune diseases. They had discovered that the mice have a mutation in a gene that they named Foxp3. They also showed that mutations in the human equivalent of this gene cause a serious autoimmune disease, IPEX.
Two years after this, Shimon Sakaguchi was able to link these discoveries. He proved that the Foxp3 gene governs the development of the cells he identified in 1995. These cells, now known as regulatory T cells, monitor other immune cells and ensure that our immune system tolerates our own tissues.
