Nobel prize for trio who unlocked immune system’s secrets
What stops the immune system from attacking our own healthy tissue? How does our body protect itself against rogue white blood cells? A Nobel prize has been awarded to a trio of scientists who found the answers.
Shimon Sakaguchi, a Japanese scientist, and Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, two American researchers, have shared the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for discovering a special kind of immune cell that acts like a “security guard”.
These cells, called regulatory T cells, travel the body to seek out and disarm any immune cells that have gone rogue and started attacking the body’s own healthy tissue, which can cause diseases such as type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
The trio’s work has helped to develop new treatments for autoimmune diseases and cancer. Their research “unleashed a whole new field in immunology”, said Marie Wahren-Herlenius at the announcement at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm yesterday.
Immune T cells latch on to invasive viruses or bacteria using receptors on their surface. Sometimes, however, they can grab hold of proteins that exist naturally within our own bodies.
It was known that some of these rogue cells can be destroyed in the thymus, a small organ in the chest, but this was thought to be the only way to get rid of them. Trials are now looking at whether it is possible to combat autoimmune conditions by boosting the number of regulatory T cells.
Professor Annette Dolphin, president of the UK’s Physiological Society, said the trio’s work was “a striking example of how fundamental physiological research can have far-reaching implications for human health”.
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