A US-Japanese trio on Monday won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for research into how the immune system is kept in check by identifying its “security guards”, the Nobel jury said.

The discoveries by Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell of the United States and Japan’s Shimon Sakaguchi have been decisive for understanding how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases.

Sakaguchi, a professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Centre in Osaka, told Swedish broadcaster Sveriges Radio: “It’s an honour for me. I’m looking forward to visiting Stockholm in December” to receive the award in person.

The Nobel committee was however unable to reach the two US-based laureates to break the news to them in person.

“If you hear this, call me,” the head of the Nobel Assembly, Thomas Perlmann, joked at the press conference announcing the winners.

The three won the prize for research that identified the immune system’s “security guards”, called regulatory T-cells.

Their work concerns “peripheral immune tolerance” that prevents the immune system from harming the body, and has led to a new field of research and the development of potential medical treatments now being evaluated in clinical trials.

“The hope is to be able to treat or cure autoimmune diseases, provide more effective cancer treatments and prevent serious complications after stem cell transplants,” the jury said.

Protecting the body

Sakaguchi made the first key discovery in 1995.

At the time, many researchers were convinced that immune tolerance only developed due to potentially harmful immune cells being eliminated in the thymus, through a process called “central tolerance”.

Sakaguchi, 74, showed that the immune system is more complex and discovered a previously unknown class of immune cells, which protect the body from autoimmune diseases.

Brunkow, born in 1961 and a senior project manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Ramsdell, a 64-year-old senior advisor at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, made the other key discovery in 2001, when they were able to explain why certain mice were particularly vulnerable to autoimmune diseases.

“They had discovered that mice have a mutation in a gene that they named Foxp3,” the jury said.

“They also showed that mutations in the human equivalent of this gene cause a serious autoimmune disease, IPEX.”

Two years later, Sakaguchi was able to link these discoveries.

The trio will receive their prize—a diploma, a gold medal and $1.2 million split three ways— at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.

Researchers from major US institutions typically dominate the Nobel science prizes, due largely to the US’ longstanding investment in basic science and academic freedoms.

But that could change down the line following massive US budget cuts to science programmes announced by President Donald Trump.

Since January, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated 2,100 research grants totalling around $9.5 billion and $2.6 billion in contracts, according to an independent database called Grant Watch.

Trump eyeing Peace Prize

Thomas Perlmann, secretary general of the committee that awards the Nobel Prize for Medicine, told AFP it was “no coincidence that the US has by far the most Nobel laureates”.

“But there is now a creeping sense of uncertainty about the US’ willingness to maintain their leading position in research,” he said.

Trump has meanwhile made no secret of the fact that he wants to win a Nobel himself— the Peace Prize.

Nobel experts have however said his “America First” policies and divisive style give him little chance.

“It’s completely unthinkable,” Oeivind Stenersen, a historian who has conducted research and co-written a book on the prize, told AFP.

“(Trump) is in many ways the opposite of the ideals that the Nobel Prize represents,” he said, citing “multilateral cooperation” as an example.

Trump “follows his own path, unilaterally,” Stenersen added.

Sudan’s networks of volunteers Emergency Response Rooms (ERR) helping people survive war and famine— are seen as a possible contender this year, as are media watchdogs the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.

US President Donald Trump announced that a previously planned Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House will take place on June 14 next year, coinciding with his 80th birthday.

He made the announcement during a speech at Naval Station Norfolk in honor of the US Navy’s upcoming 250th anniversary.

Trump had initially revealed in July that a UFC event would be held at the White House in 2026 but did not specify a date at the time.

The president counts UFC President Dana White as a close friend and has long considered fans of the sport part of his political base, with ties that predate his presidency.

This week, Dana White told the Sports Business Journal that the UFC will spend $700,000 to replace the South Lawn grass at the White House following the event.

Since becoming president, Trump has been a regular attendee at UFC fights, most recently attending one in New Jersey in June.

But the relationship between Trump and White goes back to 2000, when the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City was one of the few US venues willing to host UFC events at the time.

TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of UFC, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Donald Trump’s unprecedented expansion of the powers of the US presidency will be put to the test when the Supreme Court returns for its fall term on Monday.

“The crucial question will be whether it serves as a check on President Trump or just a rubber stamp approving his actions,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School.

If past is prologue, the Republican leader is in line to notch up more legal victories from a conservative-dominated bench that includes three of his own appointees.

On the docket are voting rights, state bans on the participation of transgender athletes in girls’ sports and a religious freedom case involving a Rastafarian who had his knee-length dreadlocks forcibly shorn while in prison.

But the blockbuster case this term concerns Trump’s levying of hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on imports and whether he had the statutory authority to do so.

Lower courts have ruled he did not.

But the Supreme Court has overwhelmingly sided with Trump since he returned to office, allowing, for example, mass firing of federal workers, the dismissal of members of independent agencies, the withholding of funds appropriated by Congress and racial profiling in his sweeping immigration crackdown.

“You’ve seen the court go out of its way, really bend over backwards, in order to green-light Trump administration positions,” said Cecillia Wang, national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

‘Legal equivalent of fast food’

Many of those decisions have come on the controversial emergency or “shadow” docket, where the court hands down orders after little briefing, without oral arguments and with paltry explanation.

Samuel Bray, a University of Chicago law professor, described it as the “legal equivalent of fast food”, and the court’s three liberal justices have condemned the increasing use of the emergency docket.

Chemerinsky noted in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times that using the shadow docket, the six conservative justices have “repeatedly and without exception… voted to reverse lower court decisions that had initially found Trump’s actions to be unconstitutional.”

The high-stakes tariffs case, on the other hand, will involve full briefing and oral arguments and will be heard on November 5.

Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to unilaterally impose his extensive tariffs, bypassing Congress by claiming the country was facing an emergency due to the trade deficit.

“At least hundreds of billions of dollars or more are at stake and they may need to refund those billions of dollars if they lose in the Supreme Court,” said Curtis Bradley, a University of Chicago law professor.

Other high-profile cases involving the power of the president are to be heard in December and January when the court weighs in on Trump’s bid to fire members of the independent Federal Trade Commission and Lisa Cook, a governor of the interest-rate setting Federal Reserve Board.

Voting rights

On October 15, the Supreme Court will hear a voting rights case in which “non-African American” voters are contesting the creation of a second Black majority congressional district in Louisiana, claiming it is the result of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.

A victory for the plaintiffs in the case would deal a severe blow to a section of the Voting Rights Act that allows for creation of majority-minority districts to make up for racial discrimination.

“The stakes are incredibly high,” said the ACLU’s Sophia Lin Lakin. “The outcome will not only determine the next steps for Louisiana’s congressional map, but may also shape the future of redistricting cases nationwide.”

Another notable case on the docket concerns challenges to state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban transgender girls from taking part in girls’ sports.

A religious freedom case to be heard on November 10 has unusually brought together legal advocates on both the left and the right.

Damon Landor is a devout Rastafarian whose hair was forcibly cut while he was in prison in Louisiana.

He is seeking permission to sue individual officials of the Louisiana Department of Corrections for monetary damages for violating his religious rights.

The Supreme Court is generally hostile to approving damages actions against individual government officials, Bray said.

At the same time, he noted, the right-leaning court has tended to side with the plaintiffs in religious liberty cases.