James Allison, Tasuku Honjo jointly wins 2018 Medicine Nobel Prize on their new approach to cancer treatment

 

The 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to American scientist James P Allison and Japanese researcher Tasuku Honjo “ for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation”.

The discovery was made by two Medicine Laureates by taking advantage of the immune system’s ability to attack cancer cells by releasing the “brakes” on immune cells. Honjo discovered a protein on immune cells while Allison concentrated on his groundbreaking immunotherapy research and studied the protein which acts as “brake”. 

Honjo, born in 1942 in Kyoto, Japan, was a research fellow in the US in the early 1970s and received his PhD in 1975 at Kyoto University. He has also been a faculty member at Tokyo University and Osaka University and since 1984, a professor at Kyoto University. James P Allison was born in 1948, in Texas where he also received his PhD in 1973, has worked for University of Texas, the University of California ( Berkeley) and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre Immunotherapy.