Autoimmune disease!

Your immune system is a trained killer. Three scientists won a Nobel for working out why it doesn’t kill you. Shimon Sakaguchi, Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell took the prize for cracking one of the body’s weirdest problems. Your defences exist to wipe out invaders. Sometimes they lose track of who’s who and go after your own tissue. That’s autoimmune disease. What they found is a built-in security team: regulatory T cells. They patrol the system and call off attacks on healthy tissue before the damage starts. Their work is now feeding into treatments being tested for autoimmune disease and cancer. Pretty big result from cells most people have never heard of.