Dr. James Allison

Nobel Prize Interview with Dr. James P. Allison.

What triggered your interest in researching a new cancer therapy?

My personal experience with cancer did indeed get my attention, let’s put it that way. My mother died when I was about ten years old of lymphoma. I was with her when she passed away and shortly after two of her brothers died of cancer, one of melanoma, the other of lung cancer, so I got to see the ravages of conventional therapies. So I always wanted to do something about cancer, I didn’t really know how. I would say I went into immunology because I was fascinated by immunology, these T cells, they were just discovered when I was in college and these cells grow all over your body and go through tissues and they can detect when something there is not meant to be there. And then they eliminate it. And how do they do that?

What is the main impact of your discovery?

The main impact of our work is to show that you can effectively get your own immune system to attack cancer. It is a very radical departure from the conventional types of cancer therapies, which are radiation, surgery and chemotherapy. All of which is either to remove or kill the cancer cells. What we do has really very little to do with the cancer cell.

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the immune system gives you a way of getting your own T cells to attack the cancer and again, the kind of cancer. You don’t need to design a different thing for every cancer, let’s just put it that way. And once you got the T cells, you got them for the rest of your life, so if the cancer comes back it can immediately rejuvenate and this memory cells can then go after the cancer. So fundamentally it is completely different than conventional therapies.