James Allison and Nubia Muñoz stress the importance of combining prevention and new therapies in the battle to defeat cancer
Immunologist James Allison and epidemiologist Nubia Muñoz, winners in the tenth edition of the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards in the Biomedicine and Development Cooperation categories respectively, were equally vocal at this morning’s press conference on the need to combine treatment advances with prevention campaigns, in order to confront cancer. “We now know the cause of many cancers,” Muñoz points out, “but that should not blind us to the fact that smoking is to blame for 30% of all cancers worldwide, and these are cancers that can be avoided. We have to deploy the two weapons at our command: prevention and treatment.”
13 June, 2018
Allison voiced his agreement, while declaring himself upbeat about the results being achieved through combining new therapeutic strategies, like immunotherapy – an area where he is a pioneer – with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy: “There is still a long way to go, and I don’t believe we will ever see a world wholly free of cancer, but we are seeing a lot of progress in some cancers.”
For the Texan scientist, it is not unreasonable to talk about a “cure” in the case of patients with extremely aggressive cancers who have survived without relapse for ten years after a single treatment. This is the kind of success being achieved among metastatic melanoma sufferers by immunotherapeutic drugs developed thanks to Allison’s research, although note that only in around 20% of patients.
