OCTOBER 1, 2018
STOCKHOLM/LONDON
(Reuters) - 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 releasing the brakes on the immune system can unleash its power to
attack cancer. The resulting treatments, known as immune checkpoint blockade,
have “fundamentally changed the outcome” for some advanced cancer patients,”
the Nobel institute said.
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. A Swedish court on Monday found a man at the center of the
scandal guilty of rape and sentenced him to two years in jail.
REVOLUTIONIZED CANCER TREATMENT
Allison’s and Honjo’s
work focused on proteins that act as brakes on the immune system - preventing
the body’s main immune cells, known as T-cells, from attacking tumors
effectively.
Allison, a professor
at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, worked on a protein known
as CTLA-4 and realized that if this could be blocked, a brake would be
released.
“It immediately
occurred to me, and some of the people in my lab, that maybe we can use this to
unleash the immune system to attack cancer cells,” Allison told a news
conference after getting the prize.
Honjo, a 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.
Bristol-Myers Squibb’s
(BMY.N) CTLA-4 therapy Yervoy was the first such
drug to win approval, in 2011. However, it is medicines targeting PD-1 blockade
that have proved a bigger commercial hit, led by Merck & Co’s (MRK.N) Keytruda in 2014.
These and rival drugs
from Roche (ROG.S), AstraZeneca (AZN.L), Pfizer (PFE.N) and Sanofi (SASY.PA) now offer new options for patients with
melanoma, lung and bladder cancers.
Sales of such
medicines, which are given as infusions, are expected to reach some $15 billion
this year, according to Thomson Reuters consensus forecasts. Some analysts see
eventual revenues of $50 billion.
Honjo, who is now 76,
told a news conference in Tokyo he was honored to get the Nobel, but his work
was not yet done.
“I would like to keep
on doing my research ...so that this immune treatment could save more cancer
patients,” he said.
Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe congratulated Honjo in a phone call, telling him: “I believe the
achievements of your research have given cancer patients hope and light.”
Allison told a news
conference he was in a “state of shock” hours after learning from his son that
he had won a Nobel prize.
“As a basic scientist,
to have my work really impact people is just one of the best things,” he said.
“I think it’s everybody’s dream. And I’ve been lucky enough to do work that is
benefiting people now.”
Commenting on the
award, Kevin Harrington, a professor at the Institute of Cancer Research in
London, said the work had revolutionized cancer treatment.
“We’ve gone from being
in a situation where patients were effectively untreatable to having a range of
immunotherapy options that, when they work, work very well indeed,” he said in
a statement. “For some patients we see their tumors shrink or completely
disappear and are effectively cured.”
Additional reporting
by Niklas Pollard, Daniel Dickson, Gina Cherelus, Esha Vaish, Anna Ringstrom,
Ben Hirschler and Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by William Maclean
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