This was announced on the prize's social media account X, Ukrinform reports.
"The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Mary E. Brankov, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance," the message says.
According to the chairman of the Nobel Committee and Professor Olle Kampe, their discoveries were "crucial to our understanding of how the immune system functions and why not all of us have serious autoimmune diseases."
In 1995, Sakaguchi "swimmed against the tide" when he made his first key discovery. At the time, many researchers were convinced that immune tolerance developed only through the destruction of potentially harmful immune cells in the thymus through a process called central tolerance.
Instead, Sakaguchi proved that the immune system is more complex and discovered a previously unknown class of immune cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases.
For their part, Brankov and Ramsdell made another key discovery in 2001 when they presented an explanation for why a certain strain of mice is particularly vulnerable to autoimmune diseases.
They found that the mice had a mutation in a gene they called Foxp3. The scientists also showed that mutations in the human equivalent of this gene cause a serious autoimmune disease called IPEX (a rare inherited disease).
Two years later, Sakaguchi was able to link these two discoveries.
He showed that the Foxp3 gene controls the development of cells that he had identified in 1995. These cells, now known as regulatory T cells, control other immune cells and ensure that our immune system tolerates our own tissues.
The discoveries of today's laureates have launched the field of peripheral tolerance, stimulating the development of treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
This could also lead to more successful transplants. Several of these treatments are already undergoing clinical trials.
Read also: Trump said that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to someone else would be an insult to the United States
As reported by Ukrinform, Nobel Week is starting in Sweden and Norway, during which the winners of this prestigious prize for 2025 will be announced.
The winners in physics will be announced on Tuesday, the winners in chemistry on Wednesday, and the winners in literature on Thursday.
This Friday, the winner of the Peace Prize will be named in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be announced in the Swedish capital on October 13.
