Anastasia Ksenofontova
The Nobel Committee has announced the winners of the 2018 Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This year's award will go to James Ellison from the Cancer Center. M.D. Anderson University of Texas and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University for "discoveries in inhibiting the immune system to more effectively attack cancer cells." Scientists have discovered how a cancer tumor “deceives” the immune system. This made it possible to create effective anticancer therapy. Read more about the discovery in RT's material.
- 2018 Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine James Allison and Tasuku Honjo
- TT News Agency/Fredrik Sandberg via REUTERS
The Nobel Committee of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced the 2018 prize winners on Monday, October 1. The award will be presented to American James Ellison from the Cancer Center. M.D. Anderson University of Texas and Japan's Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University for their "discovery of inhibiting the immune system to more effectively attack cancer cells." Scientists have discovered how a cancer tumor “deceives” the immune system. This made it possible to create effective anticancer therapy.
Cell Wars
Among traditional cancer treatments, chemotherapy and radiation therapy are the most common. However, there are also “natural” methods of treating malignant tumors, including immunotherapy. One of its promising areas is the use of inhibitors of “immune checkpoints” located on the surface of lymphocytes (cells of the immune system).
The fact is that activation of “immune checkpoints” suppresses the development of the immune response. Such a “control point” is, in particular, the CTLA4 protein, which Ellison has been studying for many years.
In the coming days, award winners in other categories will be announced. The committee will announce the physics laureate on Tuesday, October 2. On October 3, the name of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced. The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on October 5 in Oslo, and the winner in the field of economics will be announced on October 8.
The winner of the literature prize will not be named this year; it will be announced only in 2019. This decision was made by the Swedish Academy due to the fact that the number of its members had decreased and a scandal had erupted around the organization. 18 women have accused the husband of poet Katharina Frostenson, who was elected to the academy in 1992, of sexual harassment. As a result, seven people left the Swedish Academy, including Frostenson herself.
The Royal Swedish Academy has announced the first Nobel Prize winners for this year. The Physiology or Medicine Prize went to James Ellison and Tasuku Honjo. According to the Nobel Committee, the prize was awarded for “the discovery of anticancer therapy by suppressing negative immune regulation.”
The discoveries that formed the basis of this scientific work were made back in the 1990s. James Ellison, working in California, studied an important component of the immune system - a protein that, like a brake, restrains the immune response mechanism. If the cells of the immune system are freed from this brake, the body will be much more active in recognizing and destroying tumor cells. Japanese immunologist Tasuku Honjo discovered another component of this regulatory system, acting through a slightly different mechanism. In the 2010s, the discoveries of immunologists formed the basis for effective cancer therapy.
The human immune system is forced to maintain a balance: it recognizes and attacks all proteins foreign to the body, but does not touch the body’s own cells. This balance is especially delicate in the case of cancer cells: genetically they are no different from healthy cells in the body. The function of the CTLA4 protein, which James Ellison worked with, is to serve as a checkpoint for the immune response and prevent the immune system from attacking its own proteins. The PD1 protein, the subject of Tasuku Honjo’s scientific interests, is a component of the “programmed cell death” system. Its function is also to prevent an autoimmune reaction, but it acts in a different way: it triggers or controls the mechanism of cell death of T-lymphocytes.
Cancer immunotherapy is one of the most promising areas of modern oncology. It is based on pushing the patient's immune system to recognize and destroy malignant tumor cells. The scientific discoveries of this year's Nobel laureates formed the basis for highly effective anticancer drugs that have already been approved for use. Specifically, Keytruda targets the PD1 protein, a receptor for programmed cell death. The drug was approved for use in 2014 and is used to treat non-small cell lung cancer and melanoma. Another drug, Ipilimumab, attacks the CTLA4 protein - the very “brake” of the immune system - and thereby activates it. This drug is used in patients with advanced lung or prostate cancer, and in more than half of the cases it stops further tumor growth.
James Ellison and Tasuku Honjo became the 109th and 110th winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, which has been awarded since 1901. Among the laureates of previous years are two Russian scientists: Ivan Pavlov (1904) and Ilya Mechnikov (1908). It is interesting that Ilya Mechnikov received his prize with the wording “For work on immunity,” that is, for achievements in the same field of biological science as the 2018 laureates.
In recent years, we have almost forgotten how to understand why the Nobel Prize in Medicine is awarded. The research of the laureates is so complex and incomprehensible to the ordinary mind, so ornate are the formulations explaining the reasons for its award. At first glance, the situation here is similar. How do we understand what “suppression of negative immune regulation” means? But in reality everything is much simpler, and we will prove it to you.
Firstly, the results of the laureates’ research have already been introduced into medicine: thanks to them, a new class of drugs for the treatment of cancer has been created. And they have already saved the lives of many patients or significantly extended them. The drug ipilimumab, made thanks to research James Ellison was officially registered in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration in 2011. Now there are several such drugs. All of them affect the key links in the interaction of malignant cells with our immune system. Cancer is a great deceiver and knows how to deceive our immune system. And these drugs help him restore his performance.
The secret becomes clear
This is what oncologist, doctor of medical sciences, professor, head of the scientific laboratory of cancer chemoprevention and oncopharmacology of the National Medical Research Center for Oncology named after N.N. N. N. Petrova Vladimir Bespalov:
— Nobel laureates have been conducting their research since the eighties, and thanks to them, a new direction in cancer treatment was then created: immunotherapy using monoclonal antibodies. In 2014, it was recognized as the most promising in oncology. Thanks to the research of J. Ellison and T. Honjo Several new effective drugs have been created for the treatment of cancer. These are highly precise drugs aimed at specific targets that play a key role in the development of malignant cells. For example, the drugs nivolumab and pembrolizumab block the interaction of special proteins PD-L-1 and PD-1 with their receptors. These proteins, produced by malignant cells, help them “hide” from the immune system. As a result, tumor cells become invisible to our immune system and it cannot resist them. New drugs make them visible again, and thanks to this, the immune system begins to destroy the tumor. The first drug created thanks to Nobel laureates was ipilimumab. It was used to treat metastatic melanoma, but it had serious side effects. The new generation of drugs is safer; they treat not only melanoma, but also non-small cell lung cancer, bladder cancer and other malignant tumors. Today there are several such drugs, and they continue to be actively researched. They are now being tested for some other types of cancer, and perhaps their range of use will be wider. Such drugs are registered in Russia, but, unfortunately, they are very expensive. A single course of administration costs more than a million rubles, and they must then be repeated. But they are more effective than chemotherapy. For example, up to a quarter of patients with advanced melanoma are completely cured. This result cannot be achieved with any other drugs.
Monoclones
All these drugs are monoclonal antibodies, absolutely similar to human ones. But it’s not our immune system that makes them. The drugs are produced using genetic engineering technologies. Like regular antibodies, they block antigens. The latter are played by active regulatory molecules. For example, the first drug, ipilimumab, blocked the regulatory molecule CTLA-4, which plays a critical role in protecting cancer cells from the immune system. It was this mechanism that was discovered by one of the current laureates, J. Ellison.
Monoclonal antibodies are the mainstream in modern medicine. Based on them, many new drugs for serious diseases are created. For example, such drugs have recently appeared to treat high cholesterol. They specifically bind to regulatory proteins that regulate cholesterol synthesis in the liver. By turning them off, they effectively inhibit its production, and cholesterol decreases. Moreover, they act specifically on the synthesis of bad cholesterol (LDL), without affecting the production of good cholesterol (HDL). These are very expensive drugs, but their prices are falling rapidly and sharply due to their increasing use. This used to be the case with statins. Therefore, over time, they (and, we hope, new cancer drugs too) will be more accessible.
At the beginning of October, the Nobel Committee summed up the work for 2016 in various areas of human activity that brought the greatest benefit and named the Nobel Prize nominees.
You can be skeptical about this award as much as you like, doubt the objectivity of the choice of laureates, question the value of the theories and merits put forward for nomination... All this, of course, takes place... Well, tell me, what is the value of the peace prize awarded, for example, to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990... or the similar prize that created even more noise in 2009 to American President Barack Obama for peace on the planet 🙂?
Nobel Prizes
And this year 2016 was not without criticism and discussions of new awardees, for example, the world ambiguously accepted the award of the prize in the field of literature, which went to the American rock singer Bob Dylan for his lyrics to songs, and the singer himself reacted even more ambiguously to the award, reacting for the award ceremony only two weeks later...
However, regardless of our philistine opinion, this high the award is considered the most prestigious award in the scientific world, has been alive for more than a hundred years, has hundreds of awards to its credit, and a prize fund of millions of dollars.
The Nobel Foundation was founded in 1900 after the death of its testator Alfred Nobel- an outstanding Swedish scientist, academician, Ph.D., inventor of dynamite, humanist, peace activist, and so on...
Russia ranks on the list of awardees 7th place, has a history of awards 23 Nobel laureates or 19 awards occasions(there are group ones). The last Russian to be awarded this high honor was Vitaly Ginzburg in 2010 for his discoveries in the field of physics.
So, the awards for 2016 are divided, the awards will be presented in Stockholm, the total size of the fund is changing all the time and the size of the award is changing accordingly.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2016
Few ordinary people, far from science, delve into the essence of scientific theories and discoveries that deserve special recognition. And I'm one of those :-) . But today I just want to dwell in a little more detail on one of the awards for this year. Why medicine and physiology? Yes, it’s simple, one of the most intense sections of my blog is “Being Healthy,” because the work of the Japanese interested me and I understood its essence a little. I think the article will be of interest to people who adhere to a healthy lifestyle.
So, the Nobel Prize winner in the field physiology and medicine for 2016 became a 71 year old Japanese man Yoshinori Ohsumi Yoshinori Ohsumi is a molecular biologist at Tokyo University of Technology. The topic of his work is “Discovery of the mechanisms of autophagy.”
Autophagy translated from Greek, “self-eating” or “self-eating” is a mechanism for processing and recycling unnecessary, used parts of the cell, which is performed by the cell itself. Simply put, the cell eats itself. Autophagy is inherent in all living organisms, including humans.
The process itself has been known for a long time. The scientist’s research, carried out back in the 90s, revealed and made it possible not only to understand in detail the importance of the autophagy process for many physiological processes occurring inside a living organism, in particular during adaptation to hunger, response to infection, but also to identify the genes that trigger this process.
How does the process of cleansing the body occur? And just like we clean up our trash at home, only automatically: cells pack all unnecessary trash and toxins into special “containers” - autophagosomes, then move them into lysosomes. This is where unnecessary proteins and damaged intracellular elements are digested, and fuel is released, which is used to nourish cells and build new ones. It's that simple!
But what is most interesting in this study: autophagy starts faster and proceeds more powerfully in cases where the body experiences stress and especially during FASTING.
The discovery of the Nobel Prize winner proves: religious fasting and even periodic, limited hunger are still beneficial for a living organism. Both of these processes stimulate autophagy, cleansing the body, relieve the burden on the digestive organs, thereby saving from premature aging.
Failures in autophagy processes lead to diseases such as Parkinson's, diabetes and even cancer. Doctors are looking for ways to combat them using medications. Or maybe you just need not to be afraid to subject your body to health-improving fasting, thereby stimulating renewal processes in cells? At least occasionally...
The scientist’s work once again confirmed how amazingly subtle and clever our body is, and how far not all the processes in it are known...
The Japanese scientist will receive a well-deserved prize of eight million Swedish kronor (932 thousand US dollars) along with other recipients in Stockholm on December 10, the day of Alfred Nobel’s death. And I think it’s well deserved...
Were you even a little interested? How do you feel about such conclusions from the Japanese? Do they make you happy?
To Tokyo Institute of Technology Professor Yoshinori Ohsumi. The Japanese scientist was awarded it for his fundamental work, which explained to the world how autophagy occurs - a key process of processing and recycling cellular components.
Thanks to Yoshinori Ohsumi's work, other scientists have the tools to study autophagy not only in yeast, but also in other living things, including humans. Further research revealed that autophagy is a conserved process, and in humans it occurs in much the same way. With the help of autophagy, the cells of our body receive the missing energy and construction resources, mobilizing internal reserves. Autophagy is involved in the removal of damaged cellular structures, which is important for maintaining normal cell function. This process is also one of the mechanisms of programmed cell death. Impaired autophagy may underlie cancer and Parkinson's disease. In addition, autophagy is aimed at combating intracellular infectious agents, for example, the causative agent of tuberculosis. Perhaps, thanks to the fact that yeast once revealed to us the secret of autophagy, we will get a cure for these and other diseases.
