Prestigious Prize Recognizes Pioneering Body's Defenses Discoveries
This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded for transformative findings that illuminate how the immune system attacks dangerous pathogens while sparing the healthy tissues.
A trio of esteemed researchers—Japan's Shimon Sakaguchi and American scientists Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell—share this honor.
The research identified unique "sentinels" within the immune system that remove malfunctioning defense cells capable of harming the organism.
The findings are now paving the way for new therapies for immune disorders and cancer.
The laureates will share a monetary award valued at 11 million SEK.
Crucial Findings
"The research has been decisive for understanding how the immune system operates and the reason we do not all develop serious self-attack conditions," stated the head of the award panel.
The team's research explain a core mystery: In what way does the immune system defend us from numerous invaders while leaving our own tissues unharmed?
Our immune system employs immune cells that search for indicators of disease, even pathogens and germs it has never encountered.
Such cells utilize sensors—called receptors—that are produced randomly in a vast number of combinations.
This gives the immune system the capacity to combat a broad range of threats, but the unpredictability of the process unavoidably creates white blood cells that may attack the body.
Security Guards of the Immune System
Scientists previously knew that some of these problematic defense cells were eliminated in the immune organ—the site where immune cells develop.
The latest Nobel Prize recognizes the identification of T-reg cells—known as the immune system's "peacekeepers"—which travel through the system to disarm other immune cells that assault the body's own tissues.
It is known that this mechanism fails in autoimmune diseases such as type-1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and RA.
A Nobel panel added, "These discoveries have laid the foundation for a new field of research and spurred the development of new therapies, for example for tumors and autoimmune diseases."
Regarding cancer, regulatory T-cells block the system from attacking the growth, so studies are aimed at reducing their quantity.
For autoimmune diseases, experiments are exploring boosting T-reg cells so the body is no longer under attack. A comparable method could also be useful in reducing the chances of transplanted organ rejection.
Innovative Studies
Prof Shimon Sakaguchi, from Osaka University, conducted tests on mice that had their thymus extracted, leading to self-attack conditions.
The researcher showed that injecting defense cells from healthy mice could prevent the illness—implying there was a system for preventing defenders from harming the host.
Dr. Brunkow, from the a research center in a US city, and Dr. Ramsdell, currently at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in a California city, were studying an inherited immune disorder in rodents and people that resulted in the discovery of a genetic factor critical for the way T-regs operate.
"The pioneering work has revealed how the body's defenses is controlled by regulatory T cells, preventing it from accidentally targeting the healthy cells," commented a leading physiology specialist.
"This research is a striking illustration of how basic physiological research can have far-reaching consequences for human health."
