The medicine Nobel Prize goes to 3 scientists for work on peripheral immune tolerance
STOCKHOLM — Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.
Brunkow is a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Ramsdell is a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco. Sakaguchi is a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan.
Peripheral immune tolerance is one way the body helps keep the immune system from getting out of whack and attacking its own tissues instead of foreign invaders.
Their work dates back to 1995, when Sakaguchi made the first key discovery. Brunkow and Ramsdell made another breakthrough in 2001 and Sakaguchi linked all of their work two years later.
“The laureates’ discoveries launched the field of peripheral tolerance, spurring the development of medical treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases,” the Nobel Assembly said in a news release. “This may also lead to more successful transplantations. Several of these treatments are now undergoing clinical trials.”
Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee, said he was only able to reach Sakaguchi by phone Monday morning. He left voicemails for Brunkow and Ramsdell.
The award is the first of the 2025 Nobel Prize announcements and was announced by a panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Last year’s prize was shared by Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it.
Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics Oct. 13.
The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino says he will step down in January
Bongino's tenure was at times tumultuous, including a clash with Justice Department leadership over the Epstein files. But it also involved the arrest of a suspect in the Jan. 6 pipe bomber case.
Federal court says troops can stay in D.C., and hints at prolonged deployment
A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. has ruled that National Guard troops can remain in the city for now. That decision comes after a different federal appeals court ruled that troops must leave Los Angeles earlier this week.
Jack Smith defends his prosecutions of Trump in closed-door session in Congress
The former Justice Department special counsel told the House Judiciary Committee that his team developed "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" that Trump took part in a criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election.
A Chinese man who filmed secret footage in Xinjiang risks deportation from the U.S.
Guan Heng sailed to the U.S. by boat from the Bahamas after publishing footage he filmed of purported detention camps in China. He has been held in immigration detention since August.
‘Harry Potter’ fans are flying to Broadway to see the original Draco Malfoy
Almost eight years after Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened on Broadway, Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy in the films, is now playing him as an adult onstage.
A photographer discovers miles of dinosaur tracks near Italy’s Winter Olympic venues
A nature photographer stumbled upon thousands of 210-million-year-old dinosaur tracks in Italy's central Alps, near where some Olympic skiing and snowboarding events will be held in February.
