Dialogue with Top Scientists
与科学家对话
Tasuku Honjo
[Award-winning glory]
He won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discovering a method to treat cancer by suppressing negative immune regulation."
[resume]
Tasuku Honjo was born in Kyoto, Japan. He studied medicine at Kyoto University and received his PhD there in 1975. During the 1970s he also worked in the United States at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, DC, and at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, with which he also was later associated as a visiting research fellow. In Japan he has worked at Tokyo University, Osaka University and Kyoto University, where he has been a professor since 1984.
[Major achievements]
Cancer kills millions of people every year and is one of humanity’s greatest health challenges. By stimulating the inherent ability of our immune system to attack tumor cells Tasuku Honjo and James Allison have established an entirely new principle for cancer therapy. In 1992, Honjo discovered a protein on immune cells and, after careful exploration of its function, eventually revealed that it operates as a brake on the immune system. Therapies based on his discovery proved to be strikingly effective in the fight against cancer.
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