Scientists behind game-changing cancer immunotherapies win Nobel medicine prize
STOCKHOLM/LONDON: American James Allison and Japanese Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday for game-changing discoveries about how to harness and manipulate the immune system to fight cancer.The scientists’ work in the 1990s has since swiftly led to new and dramatically improved therapies for cancers such as melanoma and lung cancer, which had previously been extremely difficult to treat.“The seminal discoveries by the two Laureates constitute a landmark in our fight against cancer,” the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said as it awarded the prize of nine million Swedish crowns ($1 million).“Allison and Honjo showed how different strategies for inhibiting the brakes on the immune system can be used in the treatment of cancer,” it said.The treatments, often referred to as “immune checkpoint therapy”, have “fundamentally changed the outcome for certain groups of patients with advanced cancer”, it added.Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year. The prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were created in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been awarded since 1901.The literature prize will not be handed out this year after the awarding body was hit by a sexual misconduct scandal.Allison and Honjo’s work had both worked on proteins that act as brakes on the immune system - preventing the body and its main immune cells, known as T-cells, from attacking tumour cells effectively.Allison, professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in the United States, worked on a protein known as CTLA-4 and realised during his work that if this could be blocked, a brake would be released, unleashing immune cells to attack tumours.Honjo, professor at Kyoto University since 1984, separately discovered a second protein called PD-1 and found that it too acted as an immune system brake, but with a different mechanism.The discoveries led to the creation of a multibillion-dollar market for new cancer medicines. In particular, drugs targeting PD-1 blockade have proved a big commercial hit, offering new options for patients with melanoma, lung and bladder cancers.
from The News International - World https://ift.tt/2y42y7p
from The News International - World https://ift.tt/2y42y7p
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