🔗 Share this article

The prestigious award in medical science has been awarded for revolutionary findings that illuminate how the body's defense network attacks dangerous pathogens while sparing the body's own cells.

A trio of renowned scientists—Japan's Shimon Sakaguchi and American experts Mary Brunkow and Dr. Ramsdell—share this honor.

Their work uncovered specialized "sentinels" within the immune system that remove malfunctioning immune cells capable of attacking the body.

These discoveries are now enabling new treatments for autoimmune diseases and cancer.

The laureates will share a monetary award worth 11 million Swedish kronor.

Decisive Discoveries

"The work has been decisive for comprehending how the body's defenses functions and the reason we don't all suffer from severe self-attack conditions," stated the chair of the award panel.

The trio's research address a core mystery: How does the defense system defend us from numerous invaders while leaving our healthy cells intact?

Our immune system employs immune cells that scan for indicators of disease, including pathogens and bacteria it has never encountered.

Such cells employ detectors—called receptors—that are produced randomly in a vast number of variations.

That gives the immune system the ability to combat a wide array of invaders, but the unpredictability of the mechanism inevitably produces immune cells that can target the body.

Security Guards of the Body

Scientists previously understood that some of these harmful defense cells were destroyed in the immune organ—the site where immune cells mature.

The latest Nobel Prize honors the identification of T-reg cells—known as the body's "security guards"—which travel through the body to disarm any immune cells that attack the body's own tissues.

We know that this mechanism fails in self-attack conditions such as type-1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis.

A prize committee added, "These findings have laid the foundation for a novel area of research and spurred the development of new treatments, for instance for cancer and immune disorders."

In cancer, regulatory T-cells block the system from attacking the tumor, so studies are aimed at lowering their quantity.

For self-attack disorders, experiments are testing boosting T-reg cells so the organism is not under attack. A similar approach could also be effective in minimizing the chances of transplanted organ failure.

Innovative Experiments

Prof Shimon Sakaguchi, from Osaka University, performed experiments on rodents that had their immune gland removed, leading to self-attack conditions.

The researcher showed that introducing defense cells from healthy animals could stop the disease—suggesting there was a system for preventing immune cells from attacking the body.

Dr. Brunkow, affiliated with the a research center in a US city, and Dr. Ramsdell, now at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in a California city, were studying an inherited autoimmune disease in mice and people that resulted in the identification of a gene critical for the way regulatory T-cells operate.

"The groundbreaking work has revealed how the immune system is kept in check by regulatory T cells, preventing it from mistakenly targeting the body's own tissues," said a leading physiology specialist.

"This work is a remarkable illustration of how fundamental biological study can have far-reaching implications for public health."