Elmhurst native Frederick Ramsdell wins 2025 Nobel Prize in medicine

STOCKHOLM -- A west suburban man is among the three winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in medicine for work on peripheral immune tolerance.

Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

Ramsdell was born in Elmhurst, Illinios. He is a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco.

Brunkow is a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Sakaguchi is a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan.

Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee, said he was only able to reach Sakaguchi by phone Monday morning. He left voicemails for Brunkow and Ramsdell.

Peripheral immune tolerance is one way the body helps keep the immune system from getting out of whack and attacking your own tissues instead of foreign invaders.

The award is the first of the 2025 Nobel Prize announcements and was announced by a panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Last year's prize was shared by Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it.

Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics Oct. 13.

The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.

The trio will share the prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).

A hike interrupted

Everyone but Fred Ramsdell seemed to know he had just won the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Ramsdell was away on a backpacking trip Monday, driving through Yellowstone National Park with his wife and two dogs, Larkin and Megan. He kept his cellphone in airplane mode as he often does on family trips.

As they drove through a small town hours later, his wife started screaming as notifications flooded her phone. She told him he'd just won the Nobel Prize in medicine alongside Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi.

"I said, 'No, I didn't,'" Ramsdell told the AP in an interview the following day from his car. "She said, 'Yes, you did. I have 200 text messages that say you won the Nobel Prize.'"

Later Monday, Ramsdell drove to a Montana hotel to connect to Wi-Fi and call friends and colleagues. He didn't speak with the Nobel committee to get their congratulations until midnight.

He said he was stunned and awed to receive the recognition. But he has no plans to change his phone habits, which he says are important for work-life balance.

Dazio reported from Berlin.