Three scientists who helped uncover how our body keeps our immune system in check — enabling it to fight off dangerous invaders while recognizing our own tissues as a friend that should be spared — won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday.

The award went to Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries around what’s known as peripheral immune tolerance, work that the Nobel committee touted as deepening our understanding of why autoimmune diseases do occur and enabling the development of potential treatments for those conditions as well as certain cancers.

Brunkow, now at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Ramsdell, an adviser at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, conducted their prize-winning research together at Celltech Chiroscience. Sakaguc

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