US, Japanese pair win Nobel Medicine Prize for cancer therapy
STOCKHOLM: Immunologists James Allison of the United States and Tasuku Honjo of Japan won the 2018 Nobel Medicine Prize for research into how the body’s natural defences can fight cancer, the jury said yesterday.
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 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 here that the therapy has “revolutionised cancer treatment” and “fundamentally changed the way we view how cancer can be managed”.
In 1995, Allison was one of two scientists to identify the ligand CTLA-4 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 during yesterday’s prize announcement here.
Around the same time, Honjo discovered a protein on immune cells, the ligand PD-1, and eventually realised that it also worked a brake, but it acted differently.
Writing on his cancer centre’s website, Allison said he was “honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious recognition”.
“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 jury said.