Two Americans scientists Mary Brunkow , Fred Ramsdell and a Japanese scientist Shimon Sakaguchi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their “groundbreaking” discoveries on how the immune system is kept in check, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute announced today.
The winners recognized the immune system’s “security guards” regulatory T cells, and mapped the genetic program that allows them to patrol dangerous immune responses. The panel stated their research has transformed contemporary immunology and forms the foundation for new treatment approaches for autoimmune disease, cancer, and organ transplantation. “Their discovery has been key to our understanding of how the immune system works and why we don’t all develop devastating autoimmune diseases,” said Nobel Committee chair Olle Kämpe in the announcement of the prize.
In 1995, Sakaguchi produced the first big discovery by showing that a certain type of T cell stops autoimmunity. This work showed that there are tolerance mechanisms outside of the thymus and went against the then-popular idea that “central tolerance only” was the only way to go. Brunkow and Ramsdell discovered mutations in the Foxp3 gene that lead to severe autoimmune disease in 2001. They also explained why a classic mouse strain was more likely to have immunological attacks. Two years later, Sakaguchi connected Foxp3 to the regulatory T cells he had talked about, making the CD4+CD25+FOXP3+ T-reg lineage the immune system’s main brake.
Brunkow is a senior program manager at Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology; Ramsdell is a scientific adviser at San Francisco’s Sonoma Biotherapeutics; Sakaguchi is a professor at Osaka University’s Immunology Frontier Research Center. The prize is worth 11 million kronor, divided equally, and with medals awarded at the Nobel ceremony on Dec. 10.
Biographical notes
• Mary E. Brunkow (b. 1961) — Ph.D., Princeton University; Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle.
• Fred Ramsdell (b. 1960) — Ph.D. 1987, UCLA; Sonoma Biotherapeutics, San Francisco.
• Shimon Sakaguchi (b. 1951) — M.D. 1976, Ph.D. 1983, Kyoto University; Osaka University, Japan.
Prize amount: 11 million SEK, shared equally between the laureates.
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