Honjo and Allison: Award for work against cancer
BY TAIWO FAROTIMI
Two scientists across two continents have won the 2018 Nobel Prize for medicine. The two of them have been recognised for their work, which discovered how the immune system of the body can fight off the scourge of cancer. They are Professors James Allison and Tasuku Honjo of the University of Texas Austin, United States and Kyoto university , Japan. The two men are to share the sum of $1.01 million prize money.
They undertook parallel researches, according to the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which selects winners of the annual prestigious award, that showed how proteins that act as brakes on the body’s immune system can act as checks on the spread of cancer.
The institute said in its statement that the work of the gentlemen constitutes “a landmark in our fight against cancer”. How did it happened? While Allison studied a known protein and developed the concept into a new treatment approach, Honjo discovered a new protein that also operated as a brake on immune cells.
In fact, in the case of Allison he said he did not really set out to work on cancer, but stumbled on the solution to the medical challenge in the process of his work. Hear this: “I didn’t set out to study cancer, but to understand the biology of T cells, these incredible cells that travel our bodies and work to protect us,” he said.
That academic pursuit has brought relief to cancer patients and oncologists all over the world. Little wonder they got praises from people from far and wide.
How do this work? The immune system protects us from diseases, but it has built-in safeguards to prevent it from attacking our tissues. Then cancer takes advantage of this safeguard, otherwise known as the ‘brakes’, to stop it from attacking cancerous tissues.
What Allison and Honjo have done is to find a way that we can unleash the immune cells to attack tumours by turning off the proteins that apply the brakes. This feat has led to the development of new drugs to treat advanced and hitherto untreatable cancer.
The new treatment, known as the immune checkpoint therapy has been deployed for the treatment of the most serious form of skin cancer, melanoma. Though it has not worked for everyone, which is why researchers are still looking at advancing studies on it, it has been very successful for scores of others, even after the cells have started to spread around the body. In fact, doctors are said to have started using the result to treat patients with lung cancer, which is the leading cause of death.
The award is particularly remarkable coming at a time cancer has been rated as the world’s number one killer disease.
Medicine is always the first Nobel award to be announced, while others will take turns from Tuesday. But the award for literature, which should have been announced on Friday, will not be given, due to a sexual scandal that rocked the awarding body.
