Dhaka, Oct. 6 -- The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded Monday to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi for their pioneering work on peripheral immune tolerance.

Brunkow, 64, is a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Ramsdell, 64, is a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco. Sakaguchi, 74, is a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan.

Peripheral immune tolerance is one way the body helps keep the immune system from getting out of whack and attacking its own tissues instead of foreign invaders. Their work dates back to 1995, when Sakaguchi made the first key discovery. Brunkow and Ramsdell made another br...