1. In October 2018, James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine for their groundbreaking efforts in inhibiting the impact of cancer in patients through immunotherapy. James P. Allison, 70-year-old immunologist and native Texan, works at the prestigious Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Tasuku Honjo is a 76-year-old immunologist and native of Kyoto, Japan who currently leads a variety of important medical research efforts at Kyoto University. Their research efforts span several decades, in two extremely different national contexts, but their recent international collaborations have reignited the profession over the last ten years.
2. Together, their cutting-edge research has helped make cancer immunology one of the most innovative branches in the field of medicine. Their current project, which focuses on mitigating negative immune regulation, has helped uncover new strategies for “inhibiting the brakes of our immune systems” through T-cell immunotherapy. Though cancer rates continue to decline throughout developed countries, it still remains the second leading cause of global mortality rates, contributing to millions of deaths each year. Thanks to their findings, many research initiatives, which had previously given up on the prospects of immunotherapy practices, are reinvesting hundreds of millions of dollars into an entirely new class of drugs that might help