Stockholm:Two scientists who discovered how to fight cancer using the body’s immune system have won the 2018 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.
The work by James P Allison, from the US, and Tasuku Honjo, from Japan, has led to treatments for advanced, deadly skin cancer.
Immune checkpoint therapy has revolutionised cancer treatment, said the prize-giving Swedish Academy.
Experts say it has proved to be “strikingly effective”.
Allison, a professor at the University of Texas, and Honjo, a professor at Kyoto University, will share the Nobel prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor – about $1.01 million or 870,000 euros.
Accepting the prize, Tasuku Honjo told reporters: “I want to continue my research … so that this immune therapy will save more cancer patients than ever.”
Treating the unrepeatable
Our immune system protects us from disease, but it has built in safeguards or to stop it from attacking our own tissue.
asuku Honjo and his team at Kyoto University
Some cancers can take advantage of those “brakes” and the dodge attack too.
Allison and Honjo discovered a way to unleash our immune cells to attack tumours by turning off proteins that put the brakes on.
And that has led to the development of new drugs that offer hope to patients with advanced and previously untreatable cancer.
Immune checkpoint therapy is being used by the NHS to treat people with the most serious form of skin cancer, melanoma.
It doesn’t work for everyone, but for some patients it appears to have worked incredibly well, getting rid of the tumour entirely, even after it had started to spread around the body.
Such remarkable results had never been seen before for patients like these.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionJames P Allison
Doctors have also been using the treatment help some people with advanced lung cancer.
Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year.
Prasanta Patnaik