Daily our immune system protects us from thousands of different microbes trying to invade our body. These all have a different aspect and many have developed similarities with human cells. But how does the body determine what to attack and what to defend? The scientists Mary Brukow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine 2025 for their crucial discoveries on peripheral immune tolerance, were created for the precious responses.
But what would it be? Peripheral immune tolerance is a mechanism of the immune system that prevents the Maturi T lymphocytes from reacting excessively or harmful against “self” antigens (the proteins of their body), once they have come out of the bone marrow and thyme (a lymphatic gland that plays an important role in regulating the immune system.
This process can take place in various ways: through inactivation (Anergia), the elimination or suppression of authoritative lymphocytes in peripheral tissues, preventing autoimmune pathologies.
The discoveries of the winners of the Nobel Prize winners 2025
“Their discoveries were decisive to understand the functioning of the immune system and the reason why not all develops serious autoimmune diseases” commented Olle Kämpi, president of the Nobel Committee, who awarded the prize.
Breaking Newsthe Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has decide to award the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or …
Posted by nobel prize on Monday, Octaber 6, 2025
The Shimon Sakaguchi, Japanese immunologist and emeritus professor of the University of Osaka, was going against the current in 1995, when he discovered a crucial element. At the time, many researchers were convinced that immune tolerance developed only due to the elimination of potentially harmful immune cells in thyme, through a process called “central tolerance”. But Sakaguchi manages to demonstrate that the immune system is more complex, identifying a previously unknown class of immune cells, which protect the body from autoimmune diseases.
Instead, scientists Mary Brukow and Fred Ramsdell made the other fundamental discovery in 2001, when they presented the explanation of the reason why some mice were particularly vulnerable to autoimmune diseases. These rodents, in fact, presented a mutation in a gene they called Foxp3. And the two scientists They also showed that mutations in the human equivalent of this gene cause a serious autoimmune disease: hypex.
Two years later, Shimon Sakaguchi managed to combine the points of these discoveries, trying that the gene Foxp3 He regulates the development of the cells he identified in 1995. These cells, now known as regulatory T cells, monitor other immune cells and guarantee that our immune system tolerates our tissues.
These revolutionary studies have opened the way to new treatments – many still in the experimentation phase – for cancer and autoimmune diseases and more effective transplants.
