Japan's Tasuku Honjo wins Nobel medicine prize for work on anticancer care
Honjo, a 76-year-old professor emeritus at Kyoto University, won the prize with James Allison of the University of Texas, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute said, KYODO NEWS reports.
Honjo found a "protein on immune cells and revealed that it also operates as a brake, but with a different mechanism of action," the institute said. "Therapies based on his discovery proved to be strikingly effective in the fight against cancer."
Honjo, who became the 26th Japanese winner of a Nobel prize, opened a pathway for a new cancer treatment by discovering the PD-1 protein, which is responsible for suppressing immune response.
His method of treating cancer by controlling the protein's function to suppress immunity led to the development of Opdivo, a drug used against lung cancer and melanoma.
Along with surgery, anticancer drugs and radiation therapy, immunotherapy is drawing attention as another treatment for cancer.
Following the discovery of the protein in 1992, Honjo presented his research in 2002 showing that a drug that prevents the unification of cancer cells and the PD-1 protein is effective against cancer in animals.
Four years later, his research was tested in a clinical examination before Opdivo was finally approved in Japan in July 2014 and subsequently in the United States and Europe.
A native of Kyoto, Honjo spent much of his youth in the city of Ube in Yamaguchi Prefecture. As a child, he enjoyed the outdoors, and deepened his interest in becoming a scientist by observing Saturn and reading the biography of renowned Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi (1876-1928).
After graduating from the medical department of Kyoto University, Honjo studied at the Carnegie Institution for Science where he was exposed to the latest research on genes and immunology.
Honjo is the fifth Japanese winner of a Nobel medicine prize.
Prior to Honjo, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Osumi won the award in 2016 for discovering and elucidating mechanisms for autophagy, an intracellular process that degrades and recycles proteins.