Nobel prize in medicine awarded to scientists for immune system research | Nobel prizes

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 2025 has been awarded to three scientists for their work on how the immune system is prevented from attacking the body.

Mary e Brunkow, now at the Institute of Biology of Systems in
Seattle, Fred Ramsdell, now in Sonoma Biotherapeutics in
San Francisco and Shimon Sakaguchi, now at the University of Osaka in Japan, have received the prize “for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance”.

Announced Monday by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, the winners will share a price of 11 million Swedish Kronor (around £ 871,400).

At the time of the announcement, Professor Thomas Perlmann, member of the Nobel Committee of the Karolinska Institute, revealed that he had managed to reach only Sakaguchi.

“We have their phone numbers, but they are probably in silent mode,” he said.

The price celebrates a fundamental discovery relating to T cells, an important player in the immune system. T cells are a type of white blood cells, produced in the bone marrow, which help report invasive microbes and kill infected or cancerous cells.

It is crucial that T cells do not attack the healthy tissues of the body, as it can cause autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. In the late 1980s, it was known that the harmful T cells were eliminated in an organ called the thymus gland, where the development of T cells migrated to the mature.

Professor Marie Wahren-Herlenius, of the Karolinska Institute, said: “For a long time, it is believed that it is the only means of self-tolerance. However, certain self-reactive cells escape in our circulation and are potentially dangerous.”

Sakaguchi revealed a second mechanism by which self-lerac tolerance, showing harmful T cells, can be eliminated by mature T cells which transport a protein on their surface called CD25. These cells have become known as regulatory T cells.

Professor Adrian Liston, of Cambridge University, said: “Essentially, these are the brakes of the immune system.”

Brunkow and Ramsdell added another piece to the puzzle, revealing mice with a severe autoimmune disorder called scurfy has a mutation in their X chromosome in a gene that the pair called FoxP3. They then showed that children with mutations in this gene develop a rare autoimmune condition called IPEX syndrome.

Sakaguchibécame the first to show that the FOXP3 gene controls the development of regulatory T cells, revealing its importance for the emergence of self-tolerance.

Liston said: “Regulatory T cells prevent most of us from having self -immunity and allergies. And another part is by having a solid system of ruptures present, we can have stronger and faster immune reactions – in the same way that a car can have a better accelerator if it has good ruptures. It is really an essential part of the immune system, and leads to a serious illness in the child if it. is broken. “

Wahren-Herlenius said that discoveries have stimulated the development of several potential treatments.

“Clinical trials are underway to increase the number of regulatory T cells to remove unwanted immune reactions in autoimmune diseases or after organ transplantation,” she said, adding that the opposite approach was used in cancer trials.

“Cancer cells can use our regulatory T cells to avoid immune reactions that could destroy cancer cells,” she said. “For cancer treatments, emphasis is therefore placed on regulation or destroying it regulatory T cells so that our immune system can act against malignant cells.”

Professor Danny Altmann, immunologist at Imperial College in London, said: “A large part of the advance in the past 30 years in understanding the immune system has come with the description, definition and characterization of regulatory T cells in various aspects of health and diseases.”

Professor Adrian Hayday, of King’s College of London and the Francis Crick Institute, said that the price for the discovery of regulatory T cells – or T -REG cells – was long -awaited, although there was work to do to fully exploit the discoveries.

“There is really a huge amount that we still do not know about T-REG cells, and the ability to regularly exploit T-REG cells and their clinic properties have not yet been made,” he said. “However, I am very convinced that it will be the case.”