Jakarta (ANTARA) – Two US scientists, Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, and a Japanese scientist, Shimon Sakaguchi, won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries on the function of the human immune system.
The discovery reveals how the immune system protects healthy cells, creating opportunities for possible new treatments for autoimmune diseases and cancer.
“Their discoveries have laid the foundations for new areas of research and stimulated the development of new treatments, for example against cancer and autoimmune diseases,” the awarding body said in a statement, as reported by Al Jazeera.
According to Reuters, the three winners presented so-called regulatory T cells, which are a group of white blood cells that act as security guards for the immune system and prevent immune cells from attacking our own bodies.
The research is about peripheral immune tolerance, or “how we keep our immune system in check so that we can fight off all the microbes present and still avoid autoimmune diseases,” said Marie Wahren-Herlenius, a professor of rheumatology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet.
Their work dates back to 1995, when Sakaguchi made the first fundamental discovery about a previously unknown subtype of T cells, now known as regulatory T cells (T-reg).
Brunkow and Ramsdell then took another breakthrough in 2001. The two discovered a causative mutation in a gene called Foxp3, a gene that also plays a role in rare human autoimmune diseases.
Two years later, Sakaguchi linked their discovery work to show that the Foxp3 gene controls the development of T-regs, which in turn act as a security guard to find and curb other forms of overreacting T cells.
Brunkow (64) is a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, while Ramsdell (64) is a scientific advisor for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Sakaguchi (74) is a leading professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University, Japan.
The prize winners were selected by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, one of Sweden’s leading medical universities, and received a prize of 11 million SEK or approximately IDR 19.5 billion which will be divided equally. The King of Sweden will also award the three gold medals.
This medical award is a precursor to the 2025 Nobel Prize, announced by a jury at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Prize winners in other fields will be announced in the coming days.
The awards ceremony will be held on December 10, coinciding with the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the prize.
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Reporter: Melusa Susthira Khalida
Publisher: Alviansyah Pasaribu
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