Regulatory T Cells: Discovery of Immune System’s ‘Security Guards’ Wins 2025 Nobel Prize
Three scientists have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering how the body stops its own immune system from turning against itself. Shimon Sakaguchi from Osaka University in Japan, Mary E. Brunkow from the Institute for System Biology, and Fred Ramsdell from Sonoma Biotherapeutics, both in the USA, identified specialized “security guard” cells that keep our immune system in check. These discoveries have been crucial for understanding how to treat and prevent autoimmune conditions. The trio will share a prize sum of 11 million Swedish Kronor ().
Related: Nobel Prize in Physics: How Hopfield And Hinton’s AI Changed Our World. An effective immune system is critical.
The Science Behind Regulatory T Cells (T-regs)
While the immune system is essential for fighting microbes, it must also be prevented from attacking the body’s own cells—a process called self-tolerance. It was the groundbreaking work by this year’s Nobel laureates that led to the discovery of the specialized immune cells – called regulatory T cells (or T-regs for short) – which prevent immune cells from attacking our own body and keep the immune system running as it should.
Work from Brunkow and Ramsdell published in the 1990s and early 2000s showed how regulatory T cells function. Their research showed that T-regs prevent immune cells from attacking the body by secreting immune-dampening proteins or by directly delivering anti-inflammatory signals.
These discoveries showed how important T-regs are in regulating other inflammatory immune cells in the body. The work of this year’s Nobel laureates has also massively opened up the field of immunology, going far beyond merely understanding the process of immune tolerance. Their work has revealed that immunity and inflammation is actively regulated. It has provided a raft of new ideas to control inflammatory disease, whether caused by infection, allergens, environmental pollutants, or autoimmunity.
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