Nobel Prize for immunology breakthroughs

The Nobel committee said the prize would be shared between three scientists, with one half going jointly to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann “for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity” and the other half to Ralph M. Steinman “for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity”.

This is not the first time a Nobel Prize has been awarded for immunology research, and many of these discoveries ultimately helped improve research on vaccines.