Medicine 2025 · Announced Oct 6
They found the guards that stop the immune system attacking the body.
Shared by three people
In plain words
Your immune system kills germs. Something has to stop it from killing you too. Sakaguchi found a kind of guard cell, the regulatory T cell. Brunkow and Ramsdell found the gene, FOXP3, that those guards need.
Why it matters
When the guards fail, the body attacks itself. That is what happens in diseases like type 1 diabetes. Doctors are now testing ways to boost the guards, or to turn them down to fight cancer.
The official reason
"for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance"
30
years from Sakaguchi's guard-cell paper (1995) to the prize
The long road
- 1995Sakaguchi describes regulatory T cells.
- 2001Brunkow and Ramsdell trace a mouse autoimmune disease to the FOXP3 gene.
- 2003FOXP3 is shown to be the master switch of the guard cells.
- 2025Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.