We Know Immunotherapy Works, But We Need To Find Out Why It Doesn't, Too

INTERVIEW

- Namita Kohli

What changed for you after the Nobel?

After the Nobel, several things changed for me. There came a sudden, not necessarily wanted, notoriety [laughs]. I couldn't go to a grocery store without people seeing me. I couldn't just be a person, you know. For a couple of months, my ability to work was affected because people would come up and see me. But it did all come back to normal, eventually.

The positive thing that really happened was the fact that immunotherapy, which was so controversial for so many years—for long, it was considered 'voodoo', 'quack medicine'—[got recognised]. I didn't really get into the big argument for a long time, because to me it made sense to focus on my work and see how it really came out. We know now that it works. We know that a lot of people with cancer are getting cured now, and so, having it finally accepted as a way of treating cancers, that is really a positive thing. Now, I can actually sit down and have discussions with people who were like ‘you have to identify the causes of cancer and block the mutations instead of saying that we make the immune system work’.

Besides the Nobel, the thing that really consolidated the whole result (of Allison's work on immunotherapy) was that the American Cancer Society released data saying that the mortality rate due to melanoma had fallen by 18 per cent, and this has largely been due to immunotherapy. It has made a difference in people's lives, and as a scientist, as someone who mostly wants to figure out how things work, being able to do something that helps people... that has been really great.

It has worked for other cancers beyond melanoma, too.