Tasuku Honjo & James Allison share the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicin. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsOn Monday October 1st the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018 was awarded jointly to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation – a discovery the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet said has “revolutionized cancer treatment and has fundamentally changed the way we view how cancer can be managed”.
Commenting on the prize, CEO of Alligator Bioscience, Per Norlén, said:
“James Allison’s and Tasuku Honjo’s pioneering research has truly transformed the management of cancer, establishing an entirely new cornerstone of cancer therapy and sparking a research revolution into how our own immune systems can be harnessed to fight disease.
Our work at Alligator Bioscience would not be possible without their research. Since the first immunotherapeutic drug, the CTLA-4 antibody Yervoy, was approved for patients in 2011, cancer researchers all over the world remain focused on developing more effective therapies that can orchestrate the body’s natural defences to fight cancer while minimising the often severe side effects.
I am proud that Alligator is building on the immunotherapy principles once established by Allison and Honjo. In particular, our bispecific drug candidate ATOR-1015, which is a next-generation CTLA-4 immuno-oncology agent, is born out of Allison’s pioneering discovery.
We are thankful for the commitment of these two scientists and to the transformation they have brought to cancer research and to patients living with cancer. Their discovery has paved the way for improved therapies for this devastating disease.”