American James Allison and Japanese Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday for game-changing discoveries about how to harness and manipulate the immune system to fight cancer. The scientists' work in the 1990s has since swiftly led to new and dramatically improved therapies for cancers such as melanoma and lung cancer, which had previously been extremely difficult to treat. Allison and Honjo showed releasing the brakes on the immune system can unleash its power to attack cancer.
The resulting treatments, known as immune checkpoint blockade , have "fundamentally changed the outcome" for some advanced cancer patients," the Nobel Institute said. Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year. The prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were created in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel…
