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| Landmark cancer therapy wins Nobel prize | Landmark cancer therapy wins Nobel prize |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Two scientists who discovered how to fight cancer using the body's immune system have won the 2018 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. | 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 James P Allison, from the US, and Tasuku Honjo, from Japan, has led to treatments for advanced, deadly skin cancer. | The work by James P Allison, from the US, and 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". | Experts say it has proved to be "strikingly effective". |
| Allison, a professor at the University of Texas, and Honjo, a professor at Kyoto University, will share the Nobel prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor - about $1.01 million or 870,000 euros. | |
| Treating the untreatable | |
| Our immune system protects us from disease, but it has built in safeguards or to stop it from attacking our own tissue. | |
| Some cancers can take advantage of those "brakes" and the dodge attack too. | |
| Allison and Honjo discovered a way to unleash our immune cells to attack tumours by turning off proteins that put the brakes on. | |
| And that has led to the development of new drugs that 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. |