The Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology distinguished the Americans Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and Japanese Shimon Sakaguchi on Monday for revealing how the immune system is self -regulated.
The ruling disseminated by the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm recognizes “its discoveries related to peripheral immune tolerance”, which prevents that system from damaging the human body, identifying T cells, which exercise as “guardians”.
“Among immunity research there are many with good results, so I feel very honored,” Sakaguchi said in a press conference from Osaka University, where he is a professor at the Vanguardia Research Center in Immunology (IFREC, in English).
The findings of these scientists laid the foundations for a new field of research, peripheral tolerance, and promoted the development of new cancer treatments and autoimmune diseases and the realization of more successful transplants, avoiding for example complications after stem cells.
Sakaguchi discovered a new kind of T cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases; Brunkow and Ramsdel revealed decisive details about the origin of these ills.
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The ‘guardians’ of the immune system
All T cells have special proteins on their surface that act as receptors to scan other cells and discover if the body is being attacked, the Karolinska Institute explains.
In the 1980s, it was known since when T cells mature in the thymus, they pass through a process called central tolerance to eliminate those that recognize as a threat to the body’s own proteins, and it was suspected of the existence of another type responsible for dealing with those that would have improperly overcome this screening.
Sakaguchi, who then worked at the Institute for Cancer Research in Nagoya (Japan), isolated matured T cells in genetically identical mice and injected them into mice without thymus, discovering that there seemed to have a type of those cells that still protected the rodents of autoimmune diseases.
In 1995 the Japanese scientist presented his finding, a new class of regulatory T cells, which also have a protein called CD25 on their surface.
“It was not a very popular idea (research), and I had difficulty obtaining research funds,” said the Japanese, at a press conference in his country.
The Nobel Prize opened the round of winners of the centenary awards, which will continue tomorrow with chemistry and, in successive days, with those of physics, literature, peace and economy.
All Nobel have the same economic endowment, which this year amounts to 11 million Swedish crowns (1.2 million dollars).
With EFE information
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