Scientist originally from Elmhurst, Illinois wins Nobel Prize in medicine
A native of the west Chicago suburb of Elmhurst is one of three scientists awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine, for discovering how the immune system is kept in check.
Elmhurst native Fred Ramsdell, 64, is a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco. He earned his Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of California Los Angeles.
He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Mary E. Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan.
The three researchers are being honored for their discoveries related to peripheral immune tolerance.
The immune system has many overlapping systems to detect and fight bacteria, viruses and other bad actors. Key immune warriors such as T cells get trained on how to spot bad actors. If some instead go awry in a way that might trigger autoimmune diseases, they're supposed to be eliminated in the thymus - a process called central tolerance.
The Nobel winners unraveled an additional way the body keeps the system in check.
The Nobel Committee said it started with Sakaguchi's discovery in 1995 of a previously unknown T cell subtype now known as regulatory T cells or T-regs. Then in 2001, Brunkow and Ramsdell discovered a culprit mutation in a gene named Foxp3, a gene that also plays a role in a rare human autoimmune disease.
The three scientists will share the prize of nearly $1.2 million.
Before cofounding Sonoma Biotherapeutics, for which he previously served as chief scientific officer, Ramsdell was the chief scientific officer for the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. At the Parker Institute, also in San Francsico, Ramsdell helped build and advance numerous research programs.
After earning his Ph.D., Ramsdell served a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. After that, he joined Immunex, where he studied T cell activation and tolerance, according to SonomaBio.
Ramsdell later joined Darwin Molecular and established its immunology program. It was there that he led the team that discovered and characterized the Foxp3 gene.
Ramsdell also served in research positions at SymoGenetics and Novo Nordisk, and he helped establish the latter company's Inflammation Research Center in Seattle.