Media Coverage

The New York Times spotlights ISB’s Mary Brunkow, co-winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, emphasizing her gene-discovery work identifying FOXP3 and establishing regulatory T cells as key guardians of immune tolerance – foundational science now informing cancer, autoimmunity, and transplantation therapies.

ISB’s Mary Brunkow, co-winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is highlighted for her gene-discovery work that pinpointed FOXP3 and unlocked regulatory T cells – core to immune tolerance – with origins in scurfy mouse studies and links to human IPEX disease. Includes how she nearly missed Sweden’s call.

In separate projects over several years, three scientists – Mary E. Brunkow of ISB, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi – uncovered a key pathway the body uses to keep the immune system in check, called peripheral immune tolerance. Their discoveries from decades ago resulted in the 2025 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

ISB’s Cory Funk is a guest on the Optispan podcast, and sifts through why hundreds of Alzheimer’s drugs have missed the mark – and what actually moves the needle – turning hard lessons into practical takeaways for patients, clinicians, and researchers.

ISB’s Sean Gibbons joins host Mark Martin and provides a lively tour of how you actually “count” a microbiome – turning gut talk into hard numbers with tools like metagenomics, qPCR, and flow cytometry, plus myth-busting and why biomass and growth rates matter for real-world health.

Dr. Sean Gibbons joins Dr. Buck Joffrey for a podcast interview to discuss the complexities of the gut microbiome, its evolution, and its significant role in health and longevity. Gibbons explains how our microbiome is established at birth, how it changes throughout life, and the impact of diet and lifestyle on its composition. The discussion also covers the challenges of modifying the microbiome, the potential of precision nutrition, and the emerging field of fecal transplants.

Using microbial community-scale metabolic models, ISB’s Gibbons Lab can analyze an individual’s gut microbiome data and predict the colonization risk of Clostridioides difficile. In an interview, Associate Professor Dr. Sean Gibbons discussed the implications of this research.

This news story details work out of ISB’s Gibbons Lab – the developtment of personalized modeling framework that forecasts C. diff colonization risk based on an individual’s unique gut microbiome. The team demonstrated how these models can also test targeted probiotic therapies designed to suppress C. diff growth before it turns deadly.