2018 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology Awarded to immune checkpoint therapy

Nobel prize for medicine goes to cancer therapy

By Michelle RobertsHealth editor, BBC News online

Two scientists who discovered how to fight cancer using the body's immune system have won the 2018 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.

The work, by Professor James P Allison from the US and Professor Tasuku Honjo from Japan, has led to treatments for advanced, deadly skin cancer.

Immune checkpoint therapy has revolutionised cancer treatment, said the prize-giving Swedish Academy.

Experts say it has proved to be "strikingly effective".

Prof Allison, of the University of Texas, and Prof Honjo, of Kyoto University, will share the Nobel prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor - about $1.01 million or 870,000 euros.

Accepting the prize, Tasuku Honjo told reporters: "I want to continue my research ... so that this immune therapy will save more cancer patients than ever."

Prof Allison said: "It's a great, emotional privilege to meet cancer patients who've been successfully treated with immune checkpoint blockade. They are living proof of the power of basic science, of following our urge to learn and to understand how things work."

Treating the untreatable

Our immune system protects us from disease, but it has built-in safeguards to stop it from attacking our own tissue.

Some cancers can take advantage of those "brakes" and dodge the attack too.

Allison and Honjo, now both in their 70s, discovered a way to unleash our immune cells to attack tumours by turning off proteins that put the brakes on.

And that led to the development of new drugs which now offer hope to patients with advanced and previously untreatable cancer.

Immune checkpoint therapy is being used by the NHS to treat people with the most serious form of skin cancer, melanoma.

It doesn't work for everyone, but for some patients it appears to have worked incredibly well, getting rid of the tumour entirely, even after it had started to spread around the body.

Such remarkable results had never been seen before for patients like these.

Doctors have also been using the treatment to help some people with advanced lung cancer.

Prof Charles Swanton, from Cancer Research UK, congratulated the prize winners, saying: "Thanks to this groundbreaking work, our own immune system's innate power against cancer has been realised and harnessed into treatments that continue to save the lives of patients. For cancers such as advanced melanoma, lung, and kidney, these immune-boosting drugs have transformed the outlook for many patients who had run out of options.

"The booming field of immunotherapy that these discoveries have precipitated is still relatively in its infancy, so it's exciting to consider how this research will progress in the future and what new opportunities will arise."

Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year.

The literature prize will not be handed out this year, after the awarding body was affected by a sexual misconduct scandal.

Recent 10 Noble Prizes for Medicine and Physiology

1. 2018-  James P Allison and Tasuku Honjo for Immune checkpoint therapy to treatments for advanced, deadly cancers.
2. 2017- Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young for unravelling how bodies keep a circadian rhythm or body clock
3. 2016 - Yoshinori Ohsumi for discovering how cells remain healthy by recycling waste.
4. 2015 - William C Campbell, Satoshi Ōmura and Youyou Tu for anti-parasite drug discoveries.
5. 2014 - John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for discovering the brain's navigating system.
6. 2013 - James Rothman, Randy Schekman, and Thomas Sudhof for their discovery of how cells precisely transport material.
7. 2012 - Two pioneers of stem cell research - John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka - were awarded the Nobel after changing adult cells into stem cells.
8. 2011 - Bruce Beutler, Jules Hoffmann and Ralph Steinman shared the prize after revolutionising the understanding of how the body fights infection.
9. 2010 - Robert Edwards for devising the fertility treatment IVF which led to the first "test tube baby" in July 1978.
10. 2009 - Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for finding the telomeres at the ends of chromosomes.

Biodiversity worsens all over the world, in urgency to cope with

An intergovernmental ecological body said on Friday that the biodiversity, the essential variety of life forms on Earth, continued to decline in every region of the world, significantly reducing nature’s capacity to contribute to people’s well-being.

Those alarming trends are endangering economies, livelihoods, food security and the quality of life of people everywhere, according to four peer-reviewed regional reports released by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Human-induced climate change, which affects temperature, precipitation and the nature of extreme events, is increasingly driving biodiversity loss and the reduction of nature’s contributions to people, said Jake Rice, a co-chair of the Americas assessment.

In the Americas, the populations of species are about 31 percent smaller than those was at the time of European colonization, according the report. With the growing effects of climate change added to the other drivers, this loss is projected to reach 40 percent by 2050, it says.

In Africa, by 2100, climate change could also result in the loss of more than half of African bird and mammal species, a 20 to 30 percent decline in the productivity of Africa’s lakes and significant loss of African plant species.

The most recent sad example went to the death of the world’s only remaining male northern white rhino in Kenya on Monday. Its death left only two female northern white rhinos on the planet.

There have been some good news in Asia, however. Over the past 25 years, marine protected areas in the region increased by almost 14 percent and terrestrial protected area by 0.3 percent. Its forest coverage increased by 2.5 percent, with the highest increases in North East Asia (22.9 percent) and by South Asia (5.8 percent).

But the report considered those efforts in Asia insufficient to halt the loss of biodiversity. Unsustainable aquaculture practices, overfishing and destructive harvesting, threaten coastal and marine ecosystems, with projections that, if current fishing practices continue, there will be no exploitable fish stocks in the region by 2048.

Also in Asia, intertidal zones are also rapidly deteriorating due to human activities as up to 90 percent of corals will suffer severe degradation by 2050, even under conservative climate change scenarios.

In the European Union, only 7 percent of marine species and 9 percent of marine habitat types have shown a “favorable conservation status.” Moreover 27 percent of species assessments and 66 percent of habitat types assessments show an “unfavorable conservation status.”

“One of the most important findings across the four IPBES regional assessments is that failure to prioritize policies and actions to stop and reverse biodiversity loss, and the continued degradation of nature’s contributions to people,” said Anne Larigauderie, the Executive Secretary of IPBES.

“Tools like these four regional assessments provide scientific evidence for better decision making and a path we can take forward to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and harness nature’s power for our collective sustainable future,” said Achim Steiner, Administrator of United Nations Development Program.