Nobel Prize for Medicine

Lymphoma Action would like to congratulate scientists James Allison, of the US, and Tasuku Honjo, of Japan, who today won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Their work on the immune system underpins the development of checkpoint inhibitors, a type of targeted drug used for some people with classical Hodgkin lymphoma and people with other types of cancer.

Checkpoint inhibitors harness the power of your immune system to destroy cancer cells. They block an interaction (the ‘checkpoint’) that helps cancer cells avoid being killed by your immune system. When the interaction is blocked using a checkpoint inhibitor, your immune system can recognise and kill the cancer cells. 

Checkpoint inhibitors are becoming an important new type of treatment for many types of cancer and research continues apace into new checkpoint inhibitors and how they can best be used.

Find out more about checkpoint inhibitors on our page about targeted drugs for lymphoma and watch out for our brand-new webpage on checkpoint inhibitors coming later this month. Search Lymphoma TrialsLink to find open clinical trials of checkpoint inhibitors for people with lymphoma.