Two scientists named James Allison and Tasuku Honjo bagged the 2018 Novel Prize for their magnificent discoveries in relation to drive and manipulate the human immune system to fight cancer.
Allison, a professor in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, United States, while working on a protein CTLA-4 realized if this could be blocked, a brake would be released which in turn would let the immune cells to attack tumors.
On the other hand Honjo, a professor in the Kyoto University separately discovered a second protein called PD-1 and found that it too acted as a brake to the immune system having a different mechanism altogether.
Meanwhile, Both the discoveries have paved way to generate a new hope for the cancer patients. Especially drugs targeting PD-1 blockade have proved to be a new popular among the patients with melanoma, lung and bladder cancers. A report
