US, Japanese pair win Nobel Medicine Prize for cancer therapy!

• The citation for this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine says the two honorees developed therapies for treating cancer.

Two immunologists, James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, won the 2018 Nobel Medicine Prize for research into how the body's natural defences can fight cancer, the jury said on Monday.

Unlike more traditional forms of cancer treatment that directly target cancer cells, Allison and Honjo figured out how to help the patient's own immune system tackle the cancer more quickly.

The award-winning discovery led to treatments targeting proteins made by some immune system cells that act as a "brake" on the body's natural defences killing cancer cells.

The Nobel Assembly said after announcing the prize in Stockholm that the therapy "has now revolutionised cancer treatment and has fundamentally changed the way we view how cancer can be managed."In 1995, Allison was one of two scientists to identify the ligand CTLA-4 as an inhibitory receptor on T-cells.

T-cells are a type of white blood cell that play a central role in the body's natural immunity to disease.