The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded Monday to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi for their pioneering work on peripheral immune tolerance.
Brunkow, 64, is a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Ramsdell, 64, is a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco. Sakaguchi, 74, 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.
“I got hold of him at his lab and he sounded incredibly grateful, expressed that it was a fantastic honor. He was quite taken by the news,” Perlmann said. He added that 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.
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.
The trio will share the prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).