Nobel Prize in medicine 2025 goes to Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, Shimon Sakaguchi -What did they do?

The Nobel Prize in medicine for 2025 was awarded to three scientists — Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi — for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

The award is the first of the 2025 Nobel Prize announcements and was announced by a panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday.

“The 2025 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi,” read the post announcing the award on the official handle for the Nobel Prize.

The trio will share the prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).

Nobel Prize in medicine: What did they do?

Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi made groundbreaking discoveries about peripheral immune tolerance.

Peripheral immune tolerance is one way the body helps maintain the immune system's balance and prevent it from attacking your own tissues instead of foreign invaders.

A peek into their work:

Their work dates back to 1995, when Dr Sakaguchi made the first key discovery. Brunkow and Ramsdell made another breakthrough in 2001, and Sakaguchi linked all of their work two years later.

“The laureates’ discoveries launched the field of peripheral tolerance, spurring the development of medical treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases,” the Nobel Assembly said in a news release.

“This may also lead to more successful transplantations. Several of these treatments are now undergoing clinical trials.”

About the winners:

• Mary E. Brunkow, 64, is a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.
• Fred Ramsdell, 64, is a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco.
• Shimon Sakaguchi, 74, is a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan.

Nobel Prize award ceremony

The award ceremony will be held on December 10, the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.