--- description: Allison remained curious as a student and became an immunologist to better understand T cells. Immunotherapy is now an important part of cancer care. title: How a Nobel-Winning Researcher Transformed Cancer Treatments image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta0ce20ad23675462/6998cc7147fe51a6a355c577/james-allison-cancer-research.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Dec 19, 2025 # How a Nobel-Winning Researcher Transformed Cancer Treatments With His Curiosity by [Alice Park](/author/alice-park/) ## Alice Park Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Senior Correspondent  Dr. James Allison accepts an award at the Cancer Research Institute 2018 Awards Gala at Metropolitan Club on Oct. 25, 2018 in New York City. Dr. James Allison accepts an award at the Cancer Research Institute 2018 Awards Gala at Metropolitan Club on Oct. 25, 2018 in New York City.Amber De Vos/Patrick McMullan—Getty Images For decades, cancer care remained relatively unchanged, as doctors largely relied on three main strategies for confronting tumors: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Yes, more sophisticated versions of these therapies have evolved as scientists began to learn more about cancer and how it works, but these main routes to disabling cancer remained pretty standard for a long time. Then came targeted therapies, which were designed to address specific mutations in tumors and manipulate them so tumors couldn’t grow. But even though these dramatically improved survival rates for many cancers, they didn’t have the overwhelming effect that doctors thought they would. Dr. James Allison, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018, unlocked one of the more powerful reasons why. As an undergraduate and later graduate student at University of Texas, Austin in the 1960s and early 1970s, a professor introduced him to T cells, then a relatively new and still mysterious component of the immune system. “He said they percolate through your body and look for viruses and infected cells, or cells that have picked up bacteria, and can eliminate them. And maybe even eliminate cancer cells,” says Allison. “I though, ‘wow, that’s cool.’” When he asked the professor how the cells recognized different things, “He said, ‘I have no idea, I don’t even think they’re real,’” says Allison. Allison remained curious, however, and decided to become an immunologist to better understand phenomena like T cells. He didn’t immediately think about what role they might play in cancer, although finding better ways to treat cancer loomed in his mind after losing his mother to lymphoma when he was 11\. Seeing her suffer from the then-crude radiation treatments she received convinced him there had to be a better way to help patients. Allison became curious about what made the unique T cells tick. How did they know which cells they needed to stick to? And how could they tell the difference between foreign microbes like bacteria and viruses and the body’s own cells? He credits a period of time in the late 1970s to mid 1980s after graduating when he was part of MD Anderson Cancer Center but working at a satellite research facility a couple of hours from Houston. There, he had the freedom to indulge in his curiosity and wasn’t constrained by typical academic obligations or administrative duties. “I had the time to just sit there and just keep working and thinking and thinking and thinking all the time about it and being able to just get up and do the experiments.” He began experimenting with mice to learn more about how the T cells, the immune system, and cancer faced off. His research led him to think that trying to rev up the immune system to tackle cancer wasn’t enough. It’s a challenging process since cancer cells are created from normal cells that have picked up mutations that make them malignant, and therefore destroy healthy cells along with the cancerous ones. In addition to activating the immune system, Allison realized, the body also needs to release the brakes on whatever system the T cells have to protect the body’s cells, which cancer cells exploit to shield themselves from being recognized as tumors. “This brake would shut off the army \[of immune cells\] that your body generated before it had a chance to really take the tumor out,” he says. “That was the idea I had.” It was an insight that would lead to the development of so-called checkpoint inhibitors, a new group of drugs that would herald the era of immunotherapy to treat cancer. But it took a while for drug makers to accept the idea, and they were initially reluctant to launch trials to test the approach in people. The key to convincing them, says Allison, was forcing them to recognize that immunotherapy isn’t an overnight success but that it takes time to educate and train the immune system to combat cancer. Ultimately a small company took a chance on testing the first checkpoint inhibitor, and larger pharmaceutical companies eventually joined in. In 2006, when Allison was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he met the first patient treated with a drug derived from his research, who was part of the early studies on the therapy. Sharon Belvin was diagnosed with late stage melanoma at age 22 and was told she shouldn’t plan to start a family or expect to have many more years to live. After receiving the drug, Belvin’s doctors were surprised to see her tumors disappear. Allison was brought to tears after hearing her story, and nearly 20 years later, Belvin now has her own family and stays in touch with him. “I talked to her a couple of weeks ago,” he says. “She’s fine and her kid’s about to go to college.” Immunotherapy is now an important part of cancer care, and plays a role in treating an increasing number of cancers. Doctors are also studying ways to optimize the power of checkpoint inhibitors, by combining them with other treatments as well as introducing them earlier in the disease, such as before surgery, to reduce the chances of recurrence and minimize the invasiveness of the surgery patients might need. It's a bright future for the field, but Allison is concerned that recent restrictions to funding of basic biomedical research by the Trump Administration will strangle the pipeline of the next breakthroughs in cancer treatments. “Over 27 years, I had a continuous grant \[from the National Institutes of Health\],” says Allison. “I had to renew it every three to five years, and it’s competitive. All of my work from the T cell receptor all of the way through the mouse work was supported by grants to some extent. But now it means somewhere between one in 25 or one in 30 people will get funded. It’s really frightening. The people in their prime who are working now and the smart people coming up need to know that there’s something there that will support them. Everybody is passionate—you don’t do this kind of work to make money. You do it because you love doing it, but you have to be able to do it.” _This article is part of TIME for Change, a new series spotlighting extraordinary leaders who are working to solve urgent health problems—one bold idea at a time._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collection/time-for-change/2026/james-allison-cancer-research-treatment/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collection/time-for-change/2026/james-allison-cancer-research-treatment/"},"headline":"How a Nobel-Winning Researcher Transformed Cancer Treatments","datePublished":"2025-12-19T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-13T16:13:50.970Z","description":"Allison remained curious as a student and became an immunologist to better understand T cells. 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