ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
A few days ago, Fred Ramsdell was doing something a lot of us dream of doing. Yes, he was on vacation with his family, camping in the Rocky Mountains. But more importantly, his phone was on airplane mode. He was truly, blissfully disconnected from the world. He missed a call, though, from the Nobel Prize Committee telling him that he'd won the 2025 prize for physiology or medicine. I suppose there are worse reasons to interrupt a vacation, but he joins us now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
FRED RAMSDELL: Thank you very much.
LIMBONG: And congratulations on the win, yeah - big deal. Before we get to it, though, can you tell me about this vacation? Was this like a yearly trip or something you've been planning for a while?
RAMSDELL: It is pretty much yearly. We - my wife and I usually take - with our dogs - usually take off right after the Labor Day holiday for two or three weeks and go up in the mountains and hang out. We try to go to the mountains as often as possible. So this isn't really that unusual for me - at least it wasn't until the end of the trip. It was our last day, and, you know, we were coming out. And my wife's phone was not in airplane mode. Hit a - we hit a small town, and her phone exploded. And I was outside, and she started yelling, my God, my God. And we're actually in grizzly bear country, and so I looked around and thought, there's no bears here. What's the problem?
LIMBONG: (Laughter).
RAMSDELL: She came back, and she's like, I have hundreds of text messages from our friends that said you won the Nobel Prize. And it was like, well, apparently, I won the Nobel Prize. OK. We should get to a town where I can get on Wi-Fi, and I can figure out what's going on.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
RAMSDELL: So we did. It was an interesting afternoon, to say the least.
LIMBONG: So let's talk about the work. So the Nobel Prize Committee awarded you and the other scientist you work with for, quote, "discovering concerning peripheral immune tolerance" - "discoveries...
RAMSDELL: Right.
LIMBONG: ...Concerning peripheral immune tolerance." For people just hearing about this now, let's catch us up. What is that?
RAMSDELL: Yeah, what does that mean?
LIMBONG: Yeah (laughter).
RAMSDELL: So it turns out there's a very small population of cells in everybody's body that prevent the immune system from attacking you and your own tissues, right? The immune system is designed to mostly protect us from viruses and funguses and bacteria and all those sorts of pathogens. But at the same time, it can attack us - rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, etc., etc. And that's just an example where it's gone wrong. There are specific cells in our body that are designed to prevent that from happening, and they work great. Most of us don't have those conditions or those diseases.
But sometimes they go awry. And it turns out what we discovered was the gene that controls those cells. What Shimon Sakaguchi discovered were those cells. But he didn't have the technology, and he didn't - at the time, didn't have the capability to understand what controlled those cells. Mary Brunkow and I actually figured that out in a completely independent line, and the two fields merged.
LIMBONG: So, you know, as I understand it, autoimmune diseases are the immune system attacking the body that it is meant to protect, right? And the gene you discovered can act as a guardrail against autoimmune diseases. And I'm wondering, how will this change the approach to the way we treat autoimmune conditions going forward?
RAMSDELL: So we're already actually in trials - both the company I work for as well as other companies - to try to treat a very few specific conditions like Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, others. And we have the potential to focus these cells on a number of different autoimmune conditions. And so we think we have a broad applicability, but we're trying to prove it in a small number of cases to begin with.
LIMBONG: That's Fred Ramsdell, one of the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Thank you so much for joining us.
RAMSDELL: It's very much my pleasure.
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