Nobel Nod for Immunity Insight: Three Scientists Win 2025 Medicine Prize
The 2025 Nobel Prize announcements have begun, with the first honor in Physiology or Medicine awarded on Monday, September 6, to three researchers—Mary Branco, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi—for their groundbreaking work on how the immune system protects the body from pathogens without damaging its own organs.
The Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute announced the laureates at 3:30 p.m. Bangladesh time. Mary E. Branco is a researcher at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, USA; Fred Ramsdell works at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, USA; and Shimon Sakaguchi is affiliated with Osaka University in Japan.
The trio will share the prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor.
According to the official Nobel Prize website, the award recognizes their discovery related to “peripheral immune tolerance.” It explains, “The human immune system must be tightly regulated, as otherwise, it can attack the body’s own tissues. Mary E. Branco, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi have made groundbreaking discoveries in this field. Their work has revealed a process by which the immune system prevents unwanted or excessive immune responses against the body’s own components (self-antigens) and harmless external substances such as certain food elements and beneficial gut bacteria.”
The Nobel Foundation further stated that their discovery “has laid the foundation for an entirely new field of research and opened the door to novel treatments for diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders.”
Last year (2024), the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA and its crucial role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.
The Nobel Prizes are announced across six categories—Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, and Economics—over six days. The awards for Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and Economics are declared from Stockholm, Sweden, while the Peace Prize is announced from Oslo, Norway.
As per the schedule, the Physics Prize will be announced tomorrow at 3:45 p.m., followed by Chemistry on October 8 at 3:45 p.m., Literature on October 9 at 5:00 p.m., and Peace on October 10 at 3:00 p.m. The Nobel Prize in Economics will be announced on October 13 at 3:45 p.m.
The laureates will receive their awards on December 10—the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death—at a formal ceremony in Stockholm and Oslo. Each winner will receive a gold medal, a diploma, and a cheque worth 11 million Swedish kronor.
