This year's Nobel Prize in medicine is shared by a cancer-fighting (and harmonica-playing) Texan.

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The 2018 Nobel Prize honors what might be our best shot at beating cancer.


James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo.
Ill. Niklas Elmehed. © Nobel Media
▼ The Nobel Prize, though often  questionable in its selections, captivates the world each year. While there are now scientific  awards with larger monetary  prizes, there is no prize so universally and immediately recognized as a sign of prestige.
The 2018 season kicked off on Monday with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which this year honors two researchers for their work on cancer therapy. James P. Allison, 70, born in Alice, Texas, and now affiliated with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco, splits the prize with Tasuku Honjo, 76, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan. Their joint prize includes 9,000,000 Swedish Krona, which is a bit more than $1,000,000 USD.
In the 1990s, Allison and Honjo did separate but parallel research on the use of the human immune  system to fight cancer. Because cancer is a disease caused by the mutation of a body's own cells, our immune systems rarely offer much assistance. Allison and Honjo showed how two different proteins can, in slightly different ways, pump the brakes on an immune system's attempts to attack multiplying cancer cells. If someone disabled such brakes, their work suggested, the immune system might have a fighting chance against cancer. The work they and others did at that time led to the development of immunotherapyas a cancer treatment, which is now a quickly growing field. This was the first step toward cancer therapies more precise and less brutal than surgery, radiation, and  chemotherapy.
This award is also the first Nobel Prize to be awarded to a cancer therapy. Past Nobels have been awarded to discoveries made to understand the mechanisms through which cancer cells work, but this is the first one that has directly translated into a clinical therapy to treat people with cancer.
Drugs based on these and similar proteins now help treat several  types of cancer, and are known as immune checkpoint inhibitors.
“I’m so thrilled that a Nobel has been awarded for this game-changing cancer therapy,” Dan Davis of the University of Manchester told The Guardian. “It doesn’t work for everyone but lives have been saved, and it has sparked a revolution in thinking about the many other ways in which the immune system can be harnessed or unleashed to fight cancer and other illnesses. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg—many more medicines like this are on the horizon.” (▪ ▪ ▪)

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