Reacción a "Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for understanding how the immune system is kept under control without attacking organs"

We received this news with great joy within the entire field of immunology and especially the Spanish Society of Immunology. What the award basically reflects is that Shimon Sakaguchi described regulatory T cells and both Brunkow and Ramsdell delved into the mechanisms that allow these T cells to prevent autoreactive capacity in our body. This discovery of regulatory T cells establishes that our body has a mechanism to somehow control antigens that are its own and antigens that are foreign, which the immune system must detect in order to respond to them. It is these regulatory T cells that dictate the balance between cells that generate an immune response and those that do not, and provide an additional control mechanism for our body. In fact, for many years, cancer research has attempted to modify these regulatory T cells because when they are found in tumours, it has been observed that our defences, our antigen-recognising T cells, do not function properly. Beyond their usefulness in research into lupus, psoriasis and other autoimmune diseases, they are vitally important in solid tumours because their elimination is responsible for restoring the effectiveness of immunotherapy.