"Regulatory T cells for immune tolerance: Their roles in autoimmunity and tumor immunity"

Sakaguchi is currently a Distinguished Honorary Professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center (IFReC) the University of Osaka, Japan. He obtained an M.D. in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1982 from Kyoto University, Japan, where he was trained as a pathologist and immunologist. After performing postdoctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University as a Lucille P. Markey Scholar, he served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology at the Scripps Research Institute. He returned to Japan in 1991 and continued his immunology research as the Head of the Department of Immunopathology at Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Tokyo. From 1998 to 2011, he was a Professor of Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences Kyoto University and served as the Director of the Institute from 2007 to 2011. In 2011, his lab moved to the University of Osaka. He was elected to Foreign Member of National Academy of Sciences USA in 2012, and has been awarded many international prizes including Cancer Research Institute’s William B. Coley Award in 2004, Keio Medical Science Prize in 2008, Canada Gairdner International Award in 2015, the Crafoord Prize in 2017, the German Immunology Award in 2019, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in 2020, the Robert Koch Prize in 2020, and Debrecen Award for Molecular Medicine in 2023, and the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2025. He received an honorary degree from the University of Birmingham, UK, in 2019, the Medal with Purple Ribbon from the Government of Japan in 2009, and the Order of Culture, the highest accolade for Japanese scholars of humanities and natural sciences, from the Emperor of Japan in 2019.