Cancer is a devastating disease. Each year, approximately two million people are diagnosed with cancer, with half a million people dying from cancer-related causes. Of these, late stage melanoma is one of the deadliest. However, funded by the National Institutes of Health, basic research into immunology in the 1990s by James Allison, who was then at UC Berkeley, and is now at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX) led to the development of the drug Ipilimumab. Our immune system normally protects us from invaders (like bacteria and viruses) by attacking the invaders. Cancer is also an invader, but many cancers manage to block the immune system attack. Allison discovered how to prevent that blockage, thus unleashing the immune system on cancerous tumor cells. Ipilimumab has substantially improved life expectancy and lowered death rates for individuals with a poor prognosis in melanoma. Astonishingly, a subset of individuals even achieved complete elimination of their cancer, something previously thought impossible in late stage melanoma. For his impact on immunology and the treatment of melanoma, James Allison (a “blues-loving scientist from the small town of Alice, Texas“) was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. With this research, the N.I.H. helped launch a new era of cancer immunotherapy and ongoing development of many new drugs that seek to harness our immune systems to attack malignant tumors.
(CA, TX) [NIH grants R01CA057986, R01AI026942, R37CA040041, R01CA040041 | link1 | link2 | link3 | link4 | link5 | link6 ]