American shares Nobel Prize for cancer research

U.S. researcher James Allison of the University of Texas shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine Monday with Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University for lifesaving cancer research. Allison and Honjo will share the $1.01 million prize for their research into how to help the body marshal its own defenses against invading cancers. Their discovery led to drugs that release the brakes on the immune system and have been used to treat the skin cancer melanoma, as well as cancers of the lung, head and neck, bladder, kidney, and liver. A new drug for another kind of skin cancer was approved just last week based on Allison and Honjo’s findings. The research represented “a landmark in our fight against cancer,” said the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which selects the winners.