This year's award will be announced Tuesday.

The 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize, which can be shared by as many as three people, is decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Last year's physics prize went to three Americans who used abstruse theory and ingenious equipment design to detect the faint ripples in the universe called gravitational waves.

On Monday, American James Allison and Japan's Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel medicine prize for groundbreaking work in fighting cancer with the body's own immune system.

The Nobel chemistry prize comes Wednesday, followed by the peace prize on Friday. The economics prize, which is not technically a Nobel, will be announced Oct. 8.

Explore further: Nobel physics prize: A big award often for tiny materials</s>Discovering how to unlock the power of the immune system to destroy tumors has seen the first of 2018's Nobel Prizes awarded to two immunologists on Monday.

James P. Allison, of the MD Anderson Cancer Centre at the University of Texas, and Tasuku Honjo, of Kyoto University, Japan were awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation".

Their significant body of work elucidated proteins of the immune system that can block the body from defending itself against cancer -- leading to breakthrough treatments that could use the body's own defenses to attack cancer cells known as "checkpoint inhibitors."

A functioning immune system is able to distinguish friend from foe in a precarious balancing act. It needs to be able to detect foreign threats like bacteria or viruses and differentiate them from the cells that make up the body. That role partly falls to a white blood cell known as a "T cell". Proteins on the surface of a T cell tell the immune system to kick into overdrive and ready it to destroy foreign threats -- but others act as blocks, telling the immune system to slow down.

Both Allison and Honjo discovered distinct proteins that were responsible for blocking the immune response: CTLA-4 and PD-1. By understanding these immune "brakes", the two had found potential new targets for therapy. Those discoveries sparked a revolution for specific cancer treatments.

In the past decade, immunotherapies that worked to inhibit these brakes have been trialed in patients with advanced melanoma, while others are currently being trialed in lung and prostate cancers.

The Nobel Prize in Physics and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded on Oct. 2 and Oct. 3, respectively. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Oct. 5. This year's Nobel Prize in Literature has been postponed.

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Taking It to Extremes: Mix insane situations -- erupting volcanoes, nuclear meltdowns, 30-foot waves -- with everyday tech. Here's what happens.</s>STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize for physics honors researchers for discoveries in phenomena as enormous as The Big Bang and as tiny as single particles of light.

This year’s award will be announced Tuesday.

The 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize, which can be shared by as many as three people, is decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Last year’s physics prize went to three Americans who used abstruse theory and ingenious equipment design to detect the faint ripples in the universe called gravitational waves.

On Monday, American James Allison and Japan’s Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel medicine prize for groundbreaking work in fighting cancer with the body’s own immune system.

The Nobel chemistry prize comes Wednesday, followed by the peace prize on Friday. The economics prize, which is not technically a Nobel, will be announced Oct. 8.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</s>Oct. 1 (UPI) -- The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is set to announce the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday morning.

The event is scheduled to take place around 11:45 a.m. CEST at the academy in Stockholm.

The Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded since 1901 and can include up to three different laureates.

Last year's winners were three Americans -- Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne -- honored for their contributions to the study of gravitational waves.

On Monday, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet gave this year's medicine award to cancer researchers James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo.</s>The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded on Monday to James P. Allison of the United States and Tasuku Honjo of Japan for their work on unleashing the body’s immune system to attack cancer, a breakthrough that has led to an entirely new class of drugs and brought lasting remissions to many patients who had run out of options.

Their success, which came after many researchers had given up on the idea, “brought immunotherapy out from decades of skepticism,” said Dr. Jedd Wolchok, a cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. It has, he said, “led to human applications that have affected an untold number of people’s health.”

Before Dr. Allison’s and Dr. Honjo’s discoveries, cancer treatment consisted of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormonal treatments. A statement from the Nobel committee hailed their accomplishments as establishing “an entirely new principle for cancer therapy.”

The drugs based on their work belong to a class called checkpoint inhibitors, with tongue-twisting names that have nonetheless become familiar to many patients. The first ones approved were ipilimumab (brand name Yervoy), nivolumab (Opdivo) and pembrolizumab (Keytruda). Others have since come to market.</s>James P. Allison of the United States and Tasuku Honjo of Japan were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their work in the fight against cancer.

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet recognized the pair "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation."</s>James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo are jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology

STOCKHOLM (AP) — James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo are jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology.</s>James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo have won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of cancer therapy that works by harnessing the body's own immune system.

Allison, 70, is currently chair of the department of immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Honjo, 76, is a distinguished professor at the Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study and a professor in the department of immunology and genomic medicine at Kyoto University in Japan.

Their work centers harnessing the immune system in such a way as to arrest the development of cancer. The discoveries led to the decade's major advance in cancer therapy, drugs called checkpoint inhibitors. Several such drugs have been approved for use in the US.

According to his website, Honjo discovered a key protein — Programmed Cell Death Protein 1 — in controlling whether cells live or die, a central process in determining whether cells become cancerous and grow into tumors or behave normally. The Nobel committee cited Allison's study of a protein that functions as a brake on the immune system, CTLA-4. By releasing this brake, the body's own immune system can be stimulated to attack tumors.

The prize is currently worth $1,012,297.05 and will be split between the winners.</s>Two immunologists, James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, won the 2018 Nobel Medicine Prize for research that has revolutionised the treatment of cancer, the jury said on Monday.

The pair were honoured "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation," the Nobel Assembly said.

Immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy targets proteins made by some immune system cells, as well as some cancer cells.

The proteins can stop the body's natural defences from killing cancer cells. The therapy is designed to remove this protein "brake" and allow the immune system to more quickly get to work fighting the cancer.

Allison, a professor at the University of Texas, and Honjo, a professor at Kyoto University, in 2014 won the Tang Prize, touted as Asia's version of the Nobels, for their research.

The duo will share the Nobel prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor (about USD 1.01 million).

They will receive their prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

In 2017, US geneticists Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young were awarded the medicine prize for their research on the role of genes in setting the "circadian clock" which regulates sleep and eating patterns, hormones and body temperature.

The winners of 2018 physics prize will be announced on Tuesday, followed by the chemistry prize on Wednesday. The peace prize will be announced on Friday, and the economics prize will wrap up the Nobel season on Monday, 8 October.

For the first time since 1949, the Swedish Academy has postponed the announcement of the 2018 Nobel Literature Prize until next year, amid a #MeToo scandal and bitter internal dispute that has prevented it from functioning properly.</s>Scientists Who Sparked Revolution In Cancer Treatment Share Nobel Prize In Medicine

James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo have won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries which led to the development of cancer therapies that work by harnessing the body's own immune system.

Allison, 70, is currently chair of the department of immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Honjo, 76, is a distinguished professor at the Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study and a professor in the department of immunology and genomic medicine at Kyoto University in Japan.

Their work centers on harnessing the immune system to arrest the development of cancer. The discoveries led to one of the decade's major advance in cancer therapy — drugs called checkpoint inhibitors. Several such drugs have been approved for use in the U.S.

According to his website, Honjo discovered a key protein – Programmed Cell Death Protein 1 — in controlling whether cells live or die, a central process in determining whether cells become cancerous and grow into tumors or behave normally.

The Nobel committee cited Allison's study of a protein called CTLA-4 that functions as a brake on the immune system. By releasing this brake, the body's own immune system can be stimulated to attack tumors.

Speaking to NPR in 2016, Allison said in his experiments on mice with cancer, he tinkered with one key molecule on the outside of T cells in the rodent's immune system.

"I've been doing this sort of stuff for years, and I'd never seen anything like that," Allison said. "And I thought, 'If we could do that in people, this is going to be amazing.'"

The prize is currently worth $1,012,297.05 and will be split between the winners.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their discoveries in cancer therapy.