Tasuku Honjo

Tasuku Honjo (born January 27, 1942, Kyoto, Japan) is a Japanese immunologist who contributed to the discovery of mechanisms and proteins critical to the regulation of immune responses and whose work led to the development of novel immunotherapies against cancer. Honjo was recognized for his work with the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with American immunologist James P. Allison.

Honjo studied medicine at Kyoto University, graduating with an M.D. in 1966. He later also received a Ph.D. (1975) in medical chemistry from there. While a graduate student, he received fellowships to study at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, where he carried out research on the immune response. In 1974, after returning to Japan, Honjo joined the faculty of medicine at the University of Tokyo and in 1979 moved to the Osaka University School of Medicine, where he became a professor in the department of genetics. At Osaka, Honjo elucidated the mechanism of immunoglobulin class switching (class-switch recombination), whereby B cells switch their antibody production from one antibody type to another depending on the type of antigen with which they are presented.

In 1984 Honjo returned to Kyoto University, where he joined the department of medical chemistry. There, in the 1990s, he and colleagues discovered a protein called programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) on the surface of T cells. In later experiments, Honjo and colleagues deduced the function of PD-1 as a negative regulator of immune responses and found that PD-1 deficiency played a critical role in the development of lupus-like autoimmune diseases. In the early 2000s, Honjo showed that PD-1 inhibition in animal models of cancer restored the ability of T cells to target and kill cancer cells. Honjo’s findings opened the way for the development of anti-PD-1 cancer immunotherapies, including nivolumab and pembrolizumab, which were approved for the treatment of melanoma and certain other cancers. From 2005 Honjo was a professor in the immunology and genomic medicine department at Kyoto.

Honjo received numerous awards and honours during his career, including the Kyoto Prize (2016) and the Keio Medical Science Prize (2016). He was a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2001) and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences (2003) and the Japan Academy (2005).