A revolutionary cancer treatment pioneered by the winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Medicine has been hailed as the future of fighting the disease — and it has fewer devastating side effects than chemotherapy.
While chemotherapy destroys cancerous cells along with normal cells — often with toxic and debilitating effects on a patient — immunotherapy unleashes the body’s immune system to target tumour cells.
James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan won the Nobel on Monday for identifying two different brakes on the immune system which, when turned off, allow the body’s defence system to attack cancerous cells faster and more effectively.
Allison was one of two scientists to discover the blocking effect for one such brake — or checkpoint inhibitor molecule — called CTLA-4 in 1995. Honjo discovered another, PD-1, around the same time.
Once these brakes were…
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