Block Lectureship Awardee, Nobel Prize laureate, on his pioneering work in immunotherapy
James Allison, PhD, a world-renowned cancer scientist and co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, is the recipient of the 25th Herbert and Maxine Block Memorial Lectureship Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer.
Dr. Allison, executive director of the Immunotherapy Platform at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and Tasuku Honjo, PhD, received the 2018 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for “their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.” These discoveries created the foundation of immuno-oncology, the science of using the body’s immune system to detect and kill cancer cells that had previously been able to “hide” from the immune system.
Celebrating 26 years – hear from past award recipients.Activation of T cells, a type of immune cell, is a two-step process: There is an ignition switch to start the T cells and a gas pedal to set them in motion. Dr. Allison and his lab discovered the science of CTLA-4, a protein found on T cells. When CTLA-4 binds with another protein (B7) found on the cells that activate T cells, T cells are prevented from becoming fully activated and attacking cancer cells; however, CTLA-4 puts the brakes on the anticancer response.
This discovery led to the development of an “immune checkpoint inhibitor,” an anticancer drug that released the brakes on the immune system and increased the ability of T cells to detect and kill cancer cells. Dr. Honjo and his lab team at Kyoto University in Japan discovered the science of PD-1, another protein expressed on T cells that inhibits the immune system.
As the recipient of the prestigious Block Lectureship Award, Dr. Allison and his lab will receive $50,000, one of the largest prizes given by an academic institution in the field of cancer. Dr. Allison will also mentor and collaborate with Nandini Acharya, PhD, a promising young scientist at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) who received the 2023 Block Lectureship Junior Faculty Award. Dr. Acharya and her lab team also study immunotherapy in cancer.
Dr. Allison recently met virtually with and answered questions from members of the OSUCCC – James.
Where did the idea for immunotherapy come from?
In my opinion, [scientists back then] didn’t know enough about the immune system. And if you don’t know how something works, it’s hard to make it do exactly what you want it to do. So, my own feeling was I needed to learn something about how T cells worked … what controls them, and that was basically it. We went through and found the regulatory circuits that turned them on and the regulatory circuits that turned them off. That was the birth of it all. Find something that inhibits T cells or activates them, how it does that, and then how to push on that or cover it up.
What kept you going for more than a decade, despite all the setbacks and skepticism within the scientific community and lack of interest from drug companies?
Two things. One was [the desire] to understand T cells … [and] the succession of the small victories kept me going. All I heard was it will never work, and that was very irritating for a scientist to say that will never work. Never is a word I rarely use, and if you use it too often, you’re either not a scientist or not a very good one. The second thing was, since my family had so much cancer and since I enjoyed science so much, I wanted to do something that helped people.
You have helped people, extending and saving so many lives. What has it been like to meet some of the people who have been successfully treated with the immunotherapy drug you created?
It’s been pretty humbling. I used to ask my colleagues, ‘How can you have this relationship with your patients when you know they’re going to die at the end of it?’ And they said the occasional success was the reward. They’re physicians [and see patients], and I wasn’t a physician. I was used to the lab. So, meeting Sharon (one of the first patients to be cured using his immunotherapy agent) is when it really dawned on me what’s going on, and it was very emotional. We got to be very good friends, and she went to Stockholm with me (for the Nobel Prize ceremony). She was treated in 2004 and now she has a 15- and a 16-year-old and everything is fine. No treatment, no relapses.
What is your message for young cancer scientists?
Try to keep an open mind. And take a chance now and then if something makes sense to you, even if it doesn’t make sense to other people. Check the facts; there’s nothing like data.
What does the future look like?
Cancer is no longer the lethal disease [it once was]. We can cure it in many cases – not everybody, but we can certainly cure a large fraction of people with different kinds of cancer that nobody ever thought we’d be able to do, including melanoma … We can cure cancer now; we just need to be able to do it for more people.
James Allison, PhD
Regental Chair and Professor, Department of Immunology
Olga Keith Wiess Distinguished University Chair of Cancer Research
Director, Parker Institute for Cancer Research
Executive Director, Immunotherapy Platform
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center