Nobel Prize for Medicine Going To Trio To Work With Immuntolerance

The Nobel Prize in 2025 in physiology or medicine has been awarded to three scientists – Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi – who discovered an important kind of immune cell that helps stop the immune system that attacks itself.

“It released a whole new field in immunology,” said Marie Wahren-Herlenius at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

Immune cells called T cells play a key role in immunity by grabbing invasive viruses and bacteria via receptors on their surface. New kinds of T cells are generated throughout our lives.

Sometimes the receptors grab on newly generated T-cells grasp our proteins that are the inside of viral or bacterial, which can cause conditions such as type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

The body has a system for weekly self-reactive T cells with newly formed traveling to thymus for a test. This was long assumed to be the only way in which self-measured T cells are removed.

But in 1995, Sakaguchi, now at Osaka University in Japan, showed in mouse experiment that some some circulating in the bloodstream also need to protect against auto-reactive T cells. If the mouse’s thymus is removed after birth, Sakaguchi found that the animals development of autoimmune conditions. But if T cells from healthy mice are injected into them, this is prevented. His team found that the specific T cells responsible for this have a protein called CD25 on their surface and called them CD25 regulatory T cells.

Meanwhile, Brunkow, now at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington, and Ramsdell, studied a scientific advice at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, California, a tribe of mice that is likely to have autoimmune conditions. In 2001, Brunkow and Ramsdell found that these mice have a mutation in a gene of the X chromosome called Foxp3.

People with mutations in this gene are also ESSP, especially probably to get autoimmune -Dissase because of on condition known as IPEX syndrome. In 2003 Sakaguchi showed that thesis two discoveries are connected – Foxp3 Gen plays a key role in the development of CD25 regulatory cells that the team discovered. Many scientists had been skeptical of Sakaguchi’s earlier claims, Wahren-Herlenius said. But the work of Brunkow and Ramsdell got the case.

The discovery of regulatory T cells can lead to better treatments for a wide range of conditions. On the one hand, increasing the number of regulatory T cells could help suppress the autoimmune reactions that cause such as type 1 diabetes. On the other hand, the number of regulatory T cells could increase the immune response from cancers. A number of clinical trials are now underway.

“Their discoveries have been crucial to our understanding of how the immune system works and why we do not all develop autoimmune diseases,” Olle Kämpe, the flesh of the Nobel Committee, said in a statement.