Overview

• Osaka University’s Shizufumi Sakaguchi, 74, addressed reporters with his wife and co‑researcher Noriko, 71, a day after he was named the 2025 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine.
• The couple co‑authored the landmark 1995 paper that established the immune‑restraining role of regulatory T cells.
• Sakaguchi reflected on perseverance in a once‑unpopular research area and credited his wife’s support for key decisions in their scientific journey.
• Kyoto University professor Hiroshi Kawamoto praised Sakaguchi’s data‑driven rigor, noting their 2016 co‑founding of an immunotherapy venture that later split in 2019 and his own work generating regulatory T cells from iPS cells.
• Research building on regulatory T cell biology is advancing toward applications in autoimmune disease and cancer, with the couple pursuing clinical cell therapies through their venture.