A US-Japanese trio won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for research on immune system regulation. Photo / Getty Images
A US-Japanese trio have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for research into how the immune system is kept in check by identifying its “security guards”, the Nobel jury said.
The discoveries by Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell of the United States and Japan’s Shimon Sakaguchi have been decisive for understanding how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases.
The Nobel committee was at first unable to reach the two US-based laureates to break the news to them in person.
“If you hear this, call me,” the secretary general of the Nobel committee, Thomas Perlmann, joked at the press conference announcing the winners.
Brunkow later told the Nobel Foundation she had been sleeping when the call came.
“My career in science has changed quite a bit since that work was done, and I don’t actually even work in that particular field anymore,” she said in an interview on the foundation’s website.
“It’s an honour to have been a part of that.”
Ramsdell had still not been contacted more than six hours after the announcement.
“He may be backpacking in the back country in Idaho,” his friend and colleague Jeffrey Bluestone told AFP.
The three won the prize for research that identified the immune system’s “security guards”, called regulatory T-cells.
Their work concerns “peripheral immune tolerance” that prevents the immune system from harming the body, and has led to a new field of research and the development of potential medical treatments now being evaluated in clinical trials.
“The hope is to be able to treat or cure autoimmune diseases, provide more effective cancer treatments and prevent serious complications after stem cell transplants,” the jury said.
Sakaguchi, 74, made the first key discovery in 1995, discovering a previously unknown class of immune cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases.
Brunkow, born in 1961 and now a senior project manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Ramsdell, a 64-year-old senior adviser at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, made the other key discovery in 2001.
They were able to explain why certain mice were particularly vulnerable to autoimmune diseases.
“They had discovered that mice have a mutation in a gene that they named Foxp3,” the jury said.
“They also showed that mutations in the human equivalent of this gene cause a serious autoimmune disease, IPEX.”
Two years later, Sakaguchi was able to link these discoveries.
Jonathan Fisher, head of the innate immune engineering laboratory at University College London, said that a lot of progress had been made in the field over the past five years, but had not yet led to a drug in wide use.
“There is a big gap between our scientific understanding of the immune system and our ability to investigate it and manipulate it in a lab – and our ability to actually deliver a safe-in-humans drug product that will have a consistent and beneficial effect,” he said.
Sakaguchi, a professor at Osaka University, told a press conference in Japan he hoped the award would “serve as an opportunity for this field to develop further ... in a direction where it can be applied in actual bedside and clinical settings”.
The trio will receive their prize – a diploma, a gold medal and US$1.2 million (NZ$2m) split three ways – at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.
Researchers from major US institutions typically dominate the Nobel science prizes, due largely to longstanding US investment in basic science and academic freedoms.
But that could change following massive US budget cuts to science programmes announced by President Donald Trump.
Since January, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated 2100 research grants totalling around US$9.5 billion and US$2.6b in contracts, according to an independent database, Grant Watch.
Perlmann of the Nobel medicine prize committee told AFP it was “no coincidence that the US has by far the most Nobel laureates”.
“But there is now a creeping sense of uncertainty about the US willingness to maintain their leading position in research,” he said.
- Agence France-Presse