James Allison

PhD, Nobel Laureate

• Dr. James Allison is the Regental Professor and Chair of the Department of Immunology, Vice President of Immunobiology, Executive Director of Immunotherapy Platform, Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Research, Deputy Director for David H. Koch Center for Applied Research for Genitourinary Cancers, the Olga Keith Wiess Distinguished University Chair of Cancer Research. He is the founding director of the James P. Allison Institute, established in 2022.
• Dr. Allison has spent a distinguished career studying the regulation of T cell responses and developing strategies for cancer immunotherapy. He earned the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Dr. Tasuku Honjo; for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.
• Among his most notable discoveries are the determination of the T cell receptor structure and that
  CD28 is the major costimulatory molecule that allows full activation of naïve Tcells and prevents energy in T cell clones.
• His lab resolved a major controversy by demonstrating that CTLA-4 inhibits T-cell activation by opposing CD28-mediated costimulation and that blockade of CTLA-4 could enhance T cell responses, leading to tumor rejection in animal models.
• This finding paved the wave for the emerging field of immune checkpoint blockade therapy for cancer. Work in his lab led to the development of ipilimumab, an antibody to human CTLA-4 and the first immune checkpoint blockade therapy approved by the FDA. Among many honors, he is a member of the National Academies of Science and Medicine and received the Lasker-Debakey Clinical Medical Research award, the Kovalenko Medal, the Balzan Prize, the Tang Prize, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal.
• Ongoing work in his laboratory seeks to improve immune checkpoint blockade therapies currently used by our clinicians and identify new targets to unleash the immune system to eradicate cancer.