Jim Allison Won a Nobel Prize for His Cancer Immunotherapy Breakthrough (2018)

Allison’s breakthrough was the discovery of a sort of secret handshake that cancer uses to evade the immune system, and a means to block that handshake—what the Nobel committee hailed as “a landmark in our fight against cancer,” which has “revolutionized cancer treatment, fundamentally changing the way we view how cancer can be managed.” But despite the mounting mockery of the larger scientific community and dwindling research funds, a handful of immunotherapy researchers continued to believe—and continued searching, decade after decade, for the missing piece of the cancer immunity puzzle, a factor that prevented the immune system from recognizing and attacking cancer cells. The spring cleaning is carried out by hungry, blobby Pac-Man cells in our blood—part of a 500 million-year-old personal defense force that Allison’s textbooks called the innate immune system.

Source: www.wired.com