A US-Japanese trio on Monday 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.
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 Nobel committee was 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.
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.
– Protecting the body –
Sakaguchi made the first key discovery in 1995.
At the time, many researchers were convinced that immune tolerance only developed due to potentially harmful immune cells being eliminated in the thymus gland, through a process called “central tolerance”.
Sakaguchi, 74, showed that the immune system is more complex and discovered a previously unknown class of immune cells, which protect the body from autoimmune diseases.
Brunkow, born in 1961 and a senior project manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Ramsdell, a 64-year-old senior advisor 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 last 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.
The trio will receive their prize — a diploma, a gold medal and $1.2 million 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 down the line following massive US budget cuts to science programmes announced by President Donald Trump.
Since January, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated 2,100 research grants totalling around $9.5 billion and $2.6 billion in contracts, according to an independent database, Grant Watch.
– Trump eyes Peace Prize –
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.
Trump has meanwhile made no secret of the fact that he wants to win a Nobel himself — the Peace Prize.
But his “America First” policies and divisive style make that possibility “completely unthinkable”, Oeivind Stenersen, a historian who has conducted research and co-written a book on the prize, told AFP.
Possible contenders are Sudan’s networks of volunteers — the Emergency Response Rooms (ERR) — media watchdogs the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, and Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
po/rlp
© Agence France-Presse
