Bristol-Myers Awaits Approval for Drug’s New Cancer Attack
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In 1996, James Allison, a California researcher, uncovered a way in mice to unleash the body’s disease-fighting immune system against cancer. While he was certain the approach could lead to a new kind of treatment against human tumors, he was unable at first to convince drug companies to pursue the idea.
“I hit a wall for a couple of years,” Allison, now at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said in an interview. “They thought the immune system could never take care of a big mass of tumors.”