Discoveries that revolutionized cancer care win Nobel Prize

Source: The Washington Post, October 2018

Two researchers from the U.S. and Japan won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that have revolutionized cancer care, turning the body’s immune system loose to fight tumors in an approach credited with saving an untold number of lives.

James Allison of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University learned how cancer can put the brakes on the immune system — and how to release those brakes.

Their work, conducted separately during the 1990s, led to the development of drugs known as “checkpoint inhibitors,” first used to treat the deadly skin cancer melanoma but now used for a growing list of advanced-stage tumors, including those of the lungs, head and neck, bladder, kidney, colon, and liver.