Briefs · Frontier Science
The immune system's security guards finally get their medal
Your immune system is a loaded weapon. The 2025 medicine Nobel goes to the people who found its safety catch.
On 6 October, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awarded the Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi, “for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance”. The prize is 11 million Swedish kronor, shared equally.
The story starts in 1995, when Sakaguchi discovered a previously unknown class of immune cells: regulatory T cells, or T-regs, which act as security guards, finding and curbing other T cells that overreact. In 2001, Brunkow and Ramsdell found the genetic culprit: a mutation in the gene Foxp3, linked to a rare human autoimmune disease, IPEX. Two years later, Sakaguchi showed that Foxp3 controls the development of the T-regs themselves.
Peripheral tolerance is not the immune system’s first line of defence, but rather its second: the control that restrains self-reactive cells after they leave the central immune organs. Without it, the body attacks itself.
Conclusion: the immune system is not an army, but rather an army with police — tolerant, triumphant T cells, and a Nobel at last.
Read the original at WAMC / AP
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