Tokyo – Japanese researcher Shimon Sakaguchi said Monday to feel “very honest” for having received, along with Americans Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology 2025 for their discoveries on peripheral immune tolerance.
“I feel very honest,” Sakaguchi just indicated to the media from the Japanese University of Osaka, where he is a professor at the Immunology Vanguard Research Center (IFREC, in English).
This year’s winners with the Nobel Prize identified the security guards of the immune system, regulatory T cells, which prevent immune cells from attacking our own organism.
The discoveries of the winners laid the foundations for a new field of research in peripheral tolerance, which promoted the development of medical treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases, which can also lead to more successful transplants.
The immune system learns to differentiate between their own organisms (autoantigens) and strangers (pathogens), and within the human body the central tolerance is established, which if it works normally is capable of eliminating some types of lymphocytes (fundamental white blood cells in the immune system to identify and combat pathogens).
But the immune system is not able to eliminate all lymphocytes, that is where peripheral tolerance is important, which tries to prevent those lymphocytes that “escape” attacking the tissues of the organism itself, which is essential to maintain the balance between the immune response against infections and to prevent autoimmune diseases.
Sakaguchi received recognition for contributing to identifying “the security guards of the immune system, regulatory T cells,” the Nobel assembly of the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm said Monday.
The own existence of these cells, which prevent immune cells from attacking our body, was questioned for years by many researchers and Sakaguchi “faced the opposition” of some of their own colleagues by profession, Nikkei Japanese media said Monday.
Sakaguchi demonstrated its existence in 1995, a key finding, since at that time many researchers were convinced that immune tolerance only developed due to the elimination of potentially harmful immune cells in the thymus, through a process called central tolerance.
The scientist showed that the immune system is more complex and discovered a class of immune cells hitherto unknown, which protects the body from autoimmune diseases.
Born in January 1951 in Nagahama, the researcher obtained the title of Medicine in 1976 and the doctorate in 1982, both at the Japanese University of Kioto, Sakaguchi conducted postdoctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University, according to its official biography.
Sakaguchi returned to Japan in 1991, initially as head of the Department of Immunopathology of the Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology of Tokyo and between 1998 and 2011 at the University of Kyoto. In 2011, his laboratory moved to the University of Osaka.
The immunologist has received numerous international awards, including the William B. Coley Prize of the Cancer Research Institute in 2004, the Keio of Medical Sciences in 2008 or the Robert Koch Award in 2020.
Skaguchi shares the Nobel Prize in Medicine, in a third each, with Americans Mary Brunkow (1961), of the Biological Systems Institute of Seattle and Fred Ramsdell (1960), by Sonoma Biotherapeutics. The three, like the rest of Laureados, will receive the awards on December 6 in Stockholm, with the rest of the laureate.