The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Americans for discovering the secrets of the immune system.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Americans Mary E. Brancow, Fred Ramsdell, and Japanese Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries in the field of immunology, writes Air force.

Immune tolerance is the immune system's ability to ignore harmless stimuli, particularly its own antigens. It develops early in development. It was previously thought that this was where the immune system's "training" ended. The 2025 Nobel Prize laureates have shown that this is not the case.

They discovered the immune system's "guardians," regulatory T cells, thereby laying the foundation for a new field of research, according to a Nobel Committee press release.

On the subject: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Americans who discovered microRNA: their theory helps fight cancer, viruses and genetic diseases

These discoveries have led to the development of potential treatments that are currently undergoing clinical trials.

Scientists hope they will make it possible to cure autoimmune diseases, provide more effective cancer treatment, and prevent serious complications after stem cell transplantation.

Mary E. Brancow was born in 1961. She received her PhD from Princeton University and is currently a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.

Fred Ramsdell, born in 1960, holds a PhD from the University of California and is a scientific consultant for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco.

Shimon Sakaguchi was born in 1951. He holds two doctorates from Kyoto University and is a Distinguished Professor at the Center for Advanced Study of Immunology at Osaka University.

"Guardians" of the immune system

The immune system protects us from thousands of different viruses, bacteria, and other microbes that try to invade our body. Without a functioning immune system, we would not survive.

One of the key features of the immune system is its ability to identify pathogens and distinguish them from the body's own cells. Microbes that threaten our health look different. Moreover, many of them are capable of disguising themselves as native human cells.

Researchers long believed they understood how the immune system understands which cells to attack and which not: immune cells develop through a process called central immune tolerance. However, our immune system has proven to be more complex than previously thought.

Shimon Sakaguchi made his first key discovery in 1995. At the time, many researchers were convinced that immune tolerance developed only through the elimination of potentially dangerous immune cells in the thymus (the organ in humans and many animal species where the maturation, differentiation, and immunological “training” of the immune system’s T cells occurs) through a process called central tolerance.

Sakaguchi showed that the immune system is more complex and discovered a previously unknown class of immune cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases.

Another key discovery was made in 2001 by Mary Brancow and Fred Ramsdell. They were able to explain why a certain strain of mice was particularly vulnerable to autoimmune diseases. Brancow and Ramsdell discovered a mutation in a mouse gene they named Foxp3. The scientists showed that mutations in the human equivalent of this gene cause a serious autoimmune disease called IPEX. (Symptoms include inflammatory bowel disease, eczema, and severe diarrhea. The disease manifests early in life and can be fatal. The only effective treatment was a bone marrow transplant.) Note.)

Two years later, Sakaguchi was able to connect these discoveries. He demonstrated that the Foxp3 gene controls the development of the cells he identified in 1995. These cells, now known as regulatory T cells, control other immune cells and ensure our immune system's tolerance to our own tissues.

These discoveries have pioneered the field of peripheral tolerance, stimulating the development of medical treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases. This may lead to more successful transplants. Several of these treatments are currently undergoing clinical trials.

"These discoveries have had a decisive impact on our understanding of how the immune system functions and why not all of us develop serious autoimmune diseases," said Olle Kempe, chairman of the Nobel Committee.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Americans Victor Ambrose and Gary Ravkan for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

History of awards

From 1901 to 2025, a total of 116 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded, with 229 laureates.

The Nobel Foundation's statutes provide that the prize may be divided equally between two works if each is found worthy of the award.

If the work that wins the prize is created by two or three authors, it is awarded to them jointly.

Of the 39 prizes in medicine, one laureate was awarded, 36 were shared between two people, and another 39 prizes were shared between three laureates.

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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has not been awarded nine times: in 1915-1918, 1921, 1925, 1940-1942.

According to the rules of the Nobel Committee, if none of the works under consideration seem sufficiently advanced and unique to the experts, the prize fund is retained until the following year.

There have been 13 women among the Nobel Prize laureates in Physiology or Medicine. Of these, only Barbara McClintock received it alone, without co-authors, in 1983.

To date, the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology or Medicine is Frederick G. Banting, who received it in 1923 at the age of 31.

The oldest recipient is Peyton Rose, who was 1966 years old when the prize was awarded in 87.

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