Who is James Allison and what is cancer immunotherapy?
For those of you may be unfamiliar with James Allison, he is a Nobel Prize winner who is considered to be the foremost authority on cancer immunotherapy. Cancer immunotherapy is the technology which encourages your immune system to fight cancer. Generally speaking, this does not occur naturally because your cancer is you and your body does not fight yourself. He has saved countless people and many more in future generations will be because of what he has seen through to the clinic. It was not an easy road for him and many believed it was going to fail.
The documentary
I had the opportunity to watch the “James Allison: Breakthrough” documentary. If I had to describe it in one word I would describe it as inspiring. Here is the trailer for the documentary:
Getting to know James Allison on a personal level
I found it fantastic to familiarize myself with this eccentric man who I had no idea played the harmonica in bands. He is extremely good. I think if he wanted, he could make a decent wage in a band. He even played has played with some extremely famous artists, such as Willie Nelson.
Another small clip of his harmonica playing can be found here:
I found him a little rough on the edges. He cusses quite a bit in the documentary. He has an extremely fun personality it appears and he knows how to party. I also found it very sad that later in his life, his work consumed him and it caused family problems for him. It is quite ironic that he has brought together so many families by saving their loved ones from cancer, yet it cost him his it appeared. He also has had cancer three times himself and has lost many immediate family members to cancer, including his mother. It seems his mother played a big role in his choice for being so fascinated with curing cancer.
His road to clinical success with Ipilimumab
Ipilimumab is a monoclonal antibody (hence the ending of the drug name -mab. It blocks CTLA-4’s receptor and its target on T cells and cancer. This is extremely important because when T cell’s and the cancer cell bind using the CTLA-4 receptor it is the breaks for causing the T cell to attack the cancer cell. This does not cure everyone’s cancer but it works for many people.
Dr. Allison first did a Phase 1 clinical trial with a small company and needed far more funding to get through the other phases. He needed Big Pharma to reach humans. Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) eventually took the risk with cancer immunotherapy and got approval but it wasn’t easy. The FDA initially gave them a very short timeline in terms of how to assess clinical success. The FDA said that if BMS did not see a big enough shrinkage in the tumor size by x number of months that it needed to be declared a failure. Their first Phase III clinical trial failed. The problem with this is that the cancer immunotherapy took much longer to work. BMS was eventually able to convince the FDA that the overall survival rate should be used as success criteria. BMS eventually was able to win FDA approval which has been a big game changer for cancer. People testify that being on cancer immunotherapy is far far less traumatic than being on chemotherapy and radiation.
A big thank you to James Allison, and all of those who helped bring the technology to fruition!
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