The immunotherapy prize!

Lelia DelamarreThe idea of stimulating the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer is more than 100 years old, but the development of effective immunotherapies has been challenging. The breakthrough came from the work of James Allison and colleagues, who elucidated that regulatory mechanisms fine tune the immune responses to ensure maximal efficacy against infected or abnormal cells without harming healthy tissues. Allison’s group and others showed that CD28 and CTLA-A4 are key molecules with opposite roles in the regulation of CD8 T cells, the primary population of immune cells responsible for recognizing and killing cancer cells and infected cells: CD28 enhances T cell activation, whereas CTLA-4 acts …