Prestigious Prize Honors Groundbreaking Body's Defenses Discoveries
This year's prestigious award in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded for transformative discoveries that illuminate how the immune system attacks harmful infections while sparing the healthy tissues.
A trio of renowned researchers—Japan's Shimon Sakaguchi and American experts Dr. Brunkow and Dr. Ramsdell—share this honor.
Their work identified unique "sentinels" within the defense system that remove rogue immune cells that could harming the body.
These discoveries are now paving the way for new treatments for immune disorders and cancer.
The laureates will share a prize fund valued at 11 million Swedish kronor.
Decisive Discoveries
"The work has been decisive for comprehending how the body's defenses functions and why we don't all suffer from serious autoimmune diseases," stated the chair of the award panel.
The trio's research explain a core mystery: How does the immune system protect us from numerous invaders while leaving our healthy cells intact?
Our body's protection system uses white blood cells that search for indicators of infection, even pathogens and germs it has never encountered.
These defenders employ sensors—called recognition units—that are produced randomly in countless combinations.
This provides the defense network the ability to fight a broad range of threats, but the randomness of the process unavoidably produces immune cells that can attack the body.
Protectors of the Immune System
Researchers earlier knew that a portion of these harmful defense cells were destroyed in the immune organ—the site where immune cells develop.
The latest award honors the identification of regulatory T-cells—known as the body's "security guards"—which travel through the body to disarm any defenders that assault the body's own tissues.
It is known that this process fails in self-attack conditions such as juvenile diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis.
The Nobel panel added, "These discoveries have established a new field of investigation and accelerated the creation of new treatments, for instance for cancer and autoimmune diseases."
In malignancies, T-regs block the body from attacking the growth, so studies are focused on reducing their numbers.
In self-attack disorders, trials are testing boosting T-reg cells so the organism is no longer under attack. A comparable method could also be effective in reducing the risks of transplanted organ failure.
Pioneering Studies
Professor Sakaguchi, of a Japanese institution, performed tests on rodents that had their thymus extracted, causing self-attack conditions.
He showed that injecting immune cells from healthy mice could prevent the disease—suggesting there was a system for preventing immune cells from harming the host.
Mary Brunkow, from the a research center in Seattle, and Dr. Ramsdell, now at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in a California city, were studying an inherited immune disorder in rodents and people that led to the discovery of a gene critical for how regulatory T-cells function.
"Their pioneering work has uncovered how the body's defenses is controlled by T-reg cells, stopping it from accidentally targeting the body's own tissues," said a leading biological science specialist.
"The research is a striking example of how basic physiological research can have broad consequences for public health."
