The 2018 Nobel Prize of Physiology and Medicine was presented to James P. Allison (pictured on left) and Tasuku Honjo (pictured on right) for their work on using the body’s immune system to fight cancer, and this innovation engendered the creation of a new class of drugs which brought respite to patients who had run out of options. The success of the duo “brought immunotherapy out from decades of skepticism,” according to Dr. Jedd Wolchok, a cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Wolchok further stated that their work “ led to human applications that have affected an untold number of people’s health.”
Prior to Allison and Honjo’s work, cancer treatment entailed surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and hormonal treatments, and the Nobel committee regarded their achievements as a contemporary principle for cancer therapy. The drugs created from their work are known as checkpoint inhibitors. The first approved checkpoint drugs were Yervoy, Opdivo, and Keytruda, and many others have surfaced to the market. Earlier attempts made by other scientists to employ the immune system to fight cancer occasionally worked but more often it did not. Allison and Honjo were able to succeed even though multiple people failed before them because Allison and Honjo were able to decipher the precise interactions of cells which enabled them to control the immune system.
However, checkpoint inhibitors do not help everyone, and they only work for some cancers. Checkpoint inhibitors also pose the possibility of severe side effects and are expensive. Immunotherapy, however, has become a linchpin of treatment for various forms of cancers, and research is being performed to find the optimal methods of combining checkpoint inhibitors with one another and with standard treatments to aid more patients.
