Medicine Nobel 2025: Constraining Our Immune System

By Shlomo Maital  

   The 2025 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle WA, Fred Ramsdell, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, San Francisco,  and Shimon Sakaguchi, Osaka U., Japan.

    I have two close friends, each of whom is dealing with an immune system that has somehow gotten out of control.  And a recently-departed cousin, who suffered for decades from an auto-immune disease. 

      Our immune systems are amazing.  They can detect invaders, wipe them out with T-cells and antibodies, and remember the attack in case the invaders return.  But sometimes, somehow, the immune system attacks our own bodies.  The result is disastrous.   Why does this happen.

     These three researchers made groundbreaking discoveries regarding the peripheral immune tolerance – this is the mechanism that keeps the immune system from attacking the body itself.   Sakaguchi in particular went against the stream (nearly all Nobelists do) and found a previously unknown class of immune cells, that protect the body from autoimmune disease.  Their absence causes big trouble.

    Wonderful to see a female scientist included in the three. Mary Brunkow, with Ramsdell, found why a particular strain of mouse was vulnerable to autoimmune diseases – a mutation in a gene, Foxp3. 

    Much of this pathbreaking research was done some 25 years ago and earlier.