Jim Allison

Jim Allison grew up in the tiny town Alice, Texas, and lost his mom to cancer at age 10. Today, he is not only an “iconoclast with a lab that has the feel of a pirate ship,” but he is also the Chair of the Department of Immunology and the Executive Director of the Immunotherapy Platform at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. On October 1, 2018, his phone rang at 4:30 am with a call from Stockholm. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of checkpoint inhibitors (CTLA-4) that essentially “take the brakes off” of the immune system so it can fight cancer. After years of fighting hard to bring his discovery to patients, his discovery finally sparked and entirely new way of thinking about cancer therapies. Most importantly, many lives have been saved through Jim’s work. Jim works on future cancer therapies when he is not playing the harmonica on stage with his personal idols Willie Nelson and Mickey Raphael.