Two days ago, a monday no less, James P Allison and Tasuku Honjo have been abruptly awaken (by their colleagues and relatives, before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, it would seem) by the greatest new that a scientist could possibly believe to receive on a random day of his or her life: they had been awarded with the 2018 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.
Allison and Honjo worked in the ’90s, on the immunoregulative proteins PD-1 and CTLA-4 and were pioneers of cancer immunotherapy, as they searched a way to exploit these two proteins in order to remove the brakes that tumours to put on T cells in order to suppress their oncosuppressive, immune attack. Drugs and antibody that target CTLA-4 and PD-1 represent today pivotal milestones of cancer therapy and are used today to treat several tumours.
Quite importantly, this award demonstrates how good basic research embodies one of the most important substrates on which clinical solutions can rise.