Cancer scientists win Nobel prize
Two immunologists, James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, won the 2018 Nobel Medicine Prize for research into how the body’s natural defences can fight cancer, the Nobel jury said on Monday.
Unlike more traditional forms of cancer treatment that directly target cancer cells, Allison and Honjo figured out how to help the patient’s own immune system to tackle the cancer more quickly.
The award-winning discovery led to treatments targeting proteins made by some immune system cells that act as a “brake” on the body’s natural defences killing cancer cells.
The Nobel Assembly said after announcing the prize in Stockholm that the therapy “has now revolutionised cancer treatment and has fundamentally changed the way we view how cancer can be managed”.
In 1995, Allison was one of two scientists to identify the CTLA-4 molecule as an inhibitory receptor on T-cells.
T-cells are a type of white blood cell that play a central role in the body’s natural immunity to disease.
Allison, 70, “realised the potential of releasing the brake and thereby unleashing our immune cells to attack tumours”, the Nobel jury said.
Around the same time, Honjo, 76, discovered a protein on immune cells, the ligand PD1, and eventually realised that it also worked as a brake but acted in a different way.
On the website of his University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Allison said he was “honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious recognition”, adding: “I never dreamed my research would take the direction it has.”
“It’s a great, emotional privilege to meet cancer patients who’ve been successfully treated with immune checkpoint blockade. They are living proof of the power of basic science, of following our urge to learn and to understand how things work.”
Meanwhile, Honjo vowed to push ahead with his work.
“I want to continue my research ... so that this immune therapy will save more cancer patients than ever,” he told reporters at the University of Kyoto where he is based.
The Nobel jury said that “for more than 100 years, scientists attempted to engage the immune system in the fight against cancer”.
“Until the seminal discoveries by the two laureates, progress into clinical development was modest.”
The winners of this year’s physics prize will be named on Tuesday, followed by the chemistry prize on Wednesday. The peace prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize on Monday.