Bill Nemitz: Two miracle workers win the Nobel Prize and save my life

Nobel prizes are often hidden in ambiguity. We know that a Nobel laureate has achieved something big, forward looking, but we have trouble explaining what it is and how it has changed the world.

This is not the case for James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo – at least after the place where I sat last week.

The two men, Dr. Allison of the United States and Dr. Honjo of Japan, share this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their years of research into the use of the immune system to detect and destroy cancer cells. Their separate efforts have laid the foundation for a new generation of immunotherapy drugs that now offer real hope to cancer patients who previously had none.

I know because I am one of them.

Friday morning, in Scarborough, in my comfortable chair, at New York Cancer Specialists, to read articles about these two heroes while 240 mg of nivolumab dripped into a vein in my right arm, I realized that science is a wonderful thing. Like the men and women who devote their lives to it.

Let's be clear, science is not my forte.

My most remarkable scientific achievement to date has come in the form of a huge purple-tinted crystal that I grew up in my chemistry lab at high school. Until morning, I came to check, but I found that the cooler night temperatures than usual in the lab had reduced it to a simple wire hanging in a solution jar super saturated saline.

"It happens," said my chemistry professor with a shrug. "It does not take much to dissolve them."

The following year, after only a week or two of physics debut, good old Mr. Duddy asked me to stay after class one day. He would help catapult my older brother into MIT, but the look on his face foreshadowed his message.

"It does not really work for you, huh?" He asked gently.

"Not even close," I replied.

"Let's go to the office and see what we can do with your schedule," he suggested.

"Thank you, God," I said to myself.

In college, I briefly touched on geology (I love the rocks) and on the spread of plants (free indoor plants), but by that time, the dice were thrown away. Of the many potential paths that opened before me, science was not even on the map.

This is not the case for these two Nobel laureates.

Dr. Allison, 70, loved biology so much that he studied it in a correspondence course when he was high school student in Texas.

Later, reinforced by a Ph.D. in biological sciences, he then laid the foundation for the development of "immune checkpoint inhibitors" – drugs, including my nivolumab, that essentially cancel certain proteins from "checkpoints" That slow down T cells that fight cancer. Releasing the brake – or in the case of Allison, the CTLA-4 protein – and T cells are free to tackle certain tumors.

Dr. Honjo, 76, grew up in Kyoto, Japan. During his 52-year career, he traveled half a kilometer in the United States and focused on another checkpoint, known as the PD-1 protein, and also allowed blocked T cells to wake up and go to work.

Do not be fooled. Endless readings on this topic, as well as detailed tutorials of my cancer literature, can make you feel like I know what I'm talking about here. But the truth is that I do not understand at all how this kind of thing works since I was back when Mr. Duddy started to explain the difference between vectors and scalars.

I never looked at a T lymphocyte, let alone a CTLA-4 or PD-1 immune control point. And how these geniuses manage to spot them, not to mention inhibiting them, will always remain a mystery to me.

But I know this: in 2015, when metastatic melanoma in the armpits, brain, stomach and lungs was diagnosed for the first time, my surgeries and radiation were immediately followed by the immunotherapeutic drugs that were developing on the exhaustive search of Allison and Honjo.

"Oh, you mean you are now in chemo," people would tell me.

"No," I would answer. "No chemotherapy. Immunotherapy. It's more recent. It uses your own immune system, rather than toxic chemicals, to fight cancer. "

I was not joking about the "new" game. Nivolumab was approved by the Federal Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of melanoma in December 2014, just one month before my diagnosis.

Eight months of treatment at the time then put me into partial remission. Now, after discovering a new tumor last spring, I come back to nivolumab, known in the trade as Opdivo. And according to all indications, it works again.

Unlike doctors who treat patients, researchers like Allison and Honjo work in laboratories and rarely witness the fruits of their work.

But according to the New York Times, this changed one day in 2006 for Allison when Dr. Jedd Wolchok, a cancer specialist at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, called Allison to his nearby lab and urged him to surrender. at the clinic. .

Upon arrival, Wolchok introduced him to a young woman. She had almost died of melanoma, but after four doses of ipilimumab, the immunotherapy drug developed by Allison, she was no longer diagnosed with cancer.

"Dr. Allison cried, "the Times reported.

Certainly, there is still much to be done before all cancers, with their confused mutations and their genetic complexities, do one day join the litany of once horrible diseases now largely relegated to history.

Last week, it was a good time to watch this little bag hanging on my intravenous post and thank the men and women who spend all their professional lives helping people they will never meet. People like me.

How Drs. Allison and Honjo have found the way to these miracles, I will never completely understand. Heck, I can not even grow a decent crystal.

But I'm sure of one thing. These scientists have saved my life.

Bill Nemitz can be contacted at:

[email protected]

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