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In 1982, Allison first discovered the T-cell receptor. [20] Allison's research to elucidate mechanisms of T-cell responses was conducted in the 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley. [21] [22] In the early 1990s, James Allison showed that CTLA-4 acts as an inhibitory molecule to restrict T-cell responses.
Oct 22, 2018 · The T cell wasn’t just more of the same—it was a unique cell type that did a unique job, and accomplished it in a unique way, through a unique biology. The race to clone the T-cell receptor ...
- Early Life, South Texas
- The University of Texas at Austin: Undergraduate and Graduate Training
- Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation: 1974–77
- The University of California, Berkeley: 1984–2004
- Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center: 2004–2012
- University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center: 2012–Present
I was born in 1948 in Alice, a small farming and oil town in the brush country of the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Those early years in Alice shaped who I would later become. Being in Texas, the whole town, including my two older brothers, was obsessed with football. But, I learned from a young age that being crushed under a pile of big sweaty...
I enrolled at UT Austin in the summer session immediately after high school graduation. Due to my summers in Austin, I never thought of going anywhere else. In accordance with my father’s hopes, I began as a premed student. However, I became dissatisfied with the rote memorization required in some of the pre-med courses. At the beginning of my seco...
Professors Mandy and Kitto helped me get a post-doctoral appointment in Ralph Reisfeld’s laboratory at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. I felt that this was a great choice because Scripps was a hotbed of research in immunology, and because Reisfeld had recently reported the isolation and initial characterization of human histocompatibility (...
UC Berkeley is a marvelous place, teeming with bright, inventive people seeking knowledge. My time at UC Berkeley was notable for my interactions with many wonderful colleagues and students. It was a time of discovery, collegiality, long days working in the lab, and long nights partying with everyone in the lab. Max Krummel described it best by say...
I arrived in Manhattan during the summer of 2004 with most of my laboratory intact. Over the next 8 years, I did my best to help Thomas Kelly hire a cadre of the best immunologists that we could, and I feel that we succeeded in building a truly spectacular group of basic immunologists involved in a variety of studies relevant to the cancer problem....
At MSKCC, my lab had continued exploring ways in which to improve anti-tumor responses with anti-CTLA-4 treatment. We performed many experiments including combinations with chemotherapy, radiation therapy, cryoablation and with other immune checkpoint agents. After anti-CTLA-4 was shown to have some clinical success in the early clinical trials, ma...
Sep 15, 2014 · Allison then proposed that blocking CTLA-4 would enhance activation of T-cell responses against cancer, essentially taking the brake off the immune system, which it did. While most researchers investigating cancer immunology were advocating vaccines to turn “on” T cells to drive antitumor immune responses, Dr. Allison was proposing the opposite—to block the “off” signal.
Additional proteins acting as T-cell accelerators are also required to trigger a full-blown immune response. During the 1990s, Allison studied a protein on the surface of T cells called CTLA-4. He was one of several scientists who observed that CTLA-4 functions as a brake on T cells, preventing them from attacking invaders, and thus also regulating the immune cells to avoid them attacking our ...
Jan 27, 2023 · Throughout Jim Allison’s early career, the field of oncology appeared to be unfazed by his T cell research. Allison’s introduction to the now-famed immune cell came in an undergraduate immunology course, where even the professor was apprehensive about Allison’s fascination with the recently discovered T cells. “I remember going to see the professor after class […]
Oct 1, 2015 · James P. Allison is the winner of the 2015 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for pioneering a new field of cancer immunotherapy. His achievements include elucidation of the structure of the T cell antigen receptor, elucidation of the function of CTLA-4, and the development of a CTLA-4–blocking antibody, which led to the development of therapeutic CTLA-4 antibodies (ipilimumab ...
