Physiology or Medicine
“for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance” Did you know? Your immune system has its own security guards. In 1995 Shimon Sakaguchi identified regulatory T cells, which stop other immune cells from attacking the body's own tissues. In 2001 Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell traced a deadly autoimmune disease in mice, nicknamed “scurfy”, to a gene called Foxp3. That gene turned out to be the master switch for those guards, and their work is now being used to develop treatments for autoimmune diseases and cancer.