Medicine Nobel goes to pair pioneering cancer therapy

Tasuku Honjo and James P Allison. Pics/AFP

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". The duo will share the Nobel prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor (about USD 1.01 million). They will receive their prize from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

Jean-Claude Arnault is now a convicted rapist
The man at the centre of a sex-abuse and financial crimes scandal that is tarnishing the academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature was convicted of rape and sentenced to two years in prison on Monday. Jean-Claude Arnault, a major cultural figure in Sweden, had faced two counts of rape of a woman in 2011. He was found guilty of one rape, but was acquitted of the other because the survivor said she was asleep and judges said her account wasn't reliable. Stockholm District Court said that the ruling was unanimous. Prosecutor Christina Voigt had demanded three years in prison for Arnault. He had denied the charges, which have rocked the prestigious academy.

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