Immune system breakthrough wins Nobel medicine prize for US, Japan scientists
American scientists Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi from Japan won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells, creating openings for possible new autoimmune disease and cancer treatments.
Their discoveries relate to peripheral immune tolerance, or “how we keep our immune system under control so we can fight all imaginable microbes and still avoid autoimmune disease”, said Marie Wahren-Herlenius, a rheumatology professor at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, the awarding body.
The institute said all three laureates brought to the fore so-called regulatory T cells, a class of white blood cells that act as the immune system’s security guards that keep immune cells from attacking our own body.
