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STOCKHOLM (AP) — Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for their discoveries related to peripheral immune tolerance.
Brunkow serves as a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Ramsdell is a scientific adviser at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco. Sakaguchi holds the position of distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan.
Peripheral immune tolerance is a mechanism the body uses to prevent the immune system from malfunctioning and attacking its own tissues instead of foreign invaders.
Their significant contributions trace back to 1995, when Sakaguchi made the initial key discovery. Brunkow and Ramsdell followed with a breakthrough in 2001, and Sakaguchi integrated all of their findings two years later.
“The laureates’ discoveries initiated the field of peripheral tolerance, paving the way for medical treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases,” the Nobel Assembly announced in a news release. “This may also result in more successful transplantations. Several of these treatments are currently being evaluated in clinical trials.”
Thomas Perlmann, the Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee, mentioned he was able to reach Sakaguchi by phone on 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.
The trio will share the prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).
