Research boosts therapy hopes

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to a trio of researchers for their work on peripheral immune tolerance, or how tissues and organs are saved from autoimmune attacks by rogue cells, is a recognition of its exciting potential to develop new therapies.

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Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi have been awarded the prize for explaining the mechanism by which specialist cells help weed out bad immune cells that attack healthy human tissues. The discoveries by Prof. Sakaguchi of the role of specialist regulatory T cells containing a particular surface protein, CD25, in addition to another, CD4, and by Professors Brunkow and Ramsdell of the FOXP3 gene responsible for the proper development of specialist cells, have led to years of intensive work on finding new therapies for conditions such as type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. Some of those efforts could also lead to the engineering of regulatory T cells in laboratories that would prevent immune attacks on tissues. After a slow start in the 1970s, the progress