2025 Nobel Lectures: Peripheral Immune Tolerance, MOFs, and Quantum Physics

2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

• 💡 Awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.
• 🧠 The immune system's main task is to fight pathogens, but it must also tolerate self-cells and dead cells to prevent autoimmunity.
• 🔬 While central immune tolerance in the thymus trains T-cells, it's not perfect and diminishes with age, necessitating a peripheral layer of protection.
• 🔑 Sakaguchi identified CD25 positive T-helper cells as suppressive, and Brunkow and Ramsdell linked the FOXP3 gene to this function, solving both mouse and human autoimmune diseases like IPEX syndrome.
• 🚀 Regulatory T-cells (T-regs) are being explored for therapeutic applications in autoimmune diseases (e.g., lupus nephritis) and cancer, by either specifically suppressing or unleashing immune responses.

2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

• 💡 Awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi for the development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).
• 🧩 MOFs are highly porous materials with molecular-scale empty spaces, built from metal ions and organic linkers, offering greater versatility than zeolites.
• 📜 Robson conceived the idea of pre-designed building blocks for 3D porous structures in the 1980s. Kitagawa (1997) and Yaghi (1999) demonstrated MOFs with permanent porosity, with Yaghi coining the term