US, Japanese pair win Nobel Medicine Prize

Stockholm: Two immunologists, James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, won the 2018 Nobel Medicine Prize for research into how the body's natural defences can fight cancer, the jury said on Monday.

Unlike more traditional forms of cancer treatment that directly target cancer cells, Allison and Honjo figured out how to help the patient's own immune system to tackle cancer more quickly.

The award-winning discovery led to treatments targeting proteins made by some immune system cells that act as a "brake" on the body's natural defences killing cancer cells.

The Nobel Assembly said after announcing the prize in Stockholm that the therapy "has now revolutionised cancer treatment and has fundamentally changed the way we view how cancer can be managed".

In 1995, Allison was one of two scientists to identify the CTLA-4 molecule as an inhibitory receptor on T-cells.

T-cells are a type of white blood cell that plays a central role in the body's natural immunity to disease.

Allison, 70, "realised the potential of releasing the brake and thereby unleashing our immune cells to attack tumours," the Nobel jury said.

Around the same time, Honjo discovered a protein on immune cells, the ligand PD-1, and eventually realised that it also worked a brake, but acted differently.

On the website of his University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Allison said he was "honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious recognition".

"I never dreamed my research would take the direction it has," he said.

"It's a great, emotional privilege to meet cancer patients who've been successfully treated with immune checkpoint blockade. They are living proof of the power of basic science, of following our urge to learn and to understand how things work."

Honjo, 76, meanwhile vowed to push ahead with his work.

"I want to continue my research... so that this immune therapy will save more cancer patients than ever," he told reporters at the University of Kyoto where he is based.