Overview
- The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet named Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi the 2025 laureates in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.
- Sakaguchi identified regulatory T cells in 1995, Brunkow and Ramsdell linked a Foxp3 gene mutation to severe autoimmunity in 2001, and by about 2003 Foxp3 was shown to direct regulatory T‑cell development.
- The committee said the work launched the field of peripheral tolerance and is driving therapies for autoimmune diseases, cancer and transplantation, with several treatments already in clinical trials.
- Brunkow is at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Ramsdell serves as a scientific adviser at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, and Sakaguchi is a distinguished professor at Osaka University.
- The trio will share 11 million Swedish kronor, with medals to be presented in Stockholm on December 10 as the first announcement of the 2025 Nobel week.