Cancer immunotherapy innovator James Allison receives the 2015 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award

The 2015 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award honors James P. Allison, PhD, for pioneering a new approach to cancer immunotherapy (Figure 1). Allison has made many seminal contributions to immunology, including the identification of the receptor on T cells that recognizes and binds antigens; the discovery that T cells require a second molecular signal from the costimulatory molecule CD28 to launch a response to a bound antigen; elucidation of the function of cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen-4 (CTLA-4), which acts as a built-in off-switch on T cells; and the development of a CTLA-4–blocking antibody, which unleashes T cells, allowing them to eliminate cancer cells. A therapeutic CTLA-4 antibody (ipilimumab, also known as Yervoy) is now used to treat advanced melanoma and is currently under investigation for the treatment of many other malignancies. Allison’s work has caused a paradigm shift in the treatment of cancer in which treatment is focused on helping the patient’s immune system defeat the tumor instead of targeting the tumor itself.