This time of year, Australians obsess over an annual spectacle that celebrates the achievements of our most gifted citizens – though usually, they’re fixating on their respective football codes.
But an even bigger prize is up for grabs tonight – the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It’s the first of a big week celebrating the international heroes who receive Nobel Prizes for a range of disciplines, from physics, to economics, to literature.
Twenty years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel “for their discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell mediated immune defence”.
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What did they find?
Doherty and Zinkernagel made their Nobel-winning discovery while working at Canberra’s Australian National University (ANU) in the early 1970s. Doherty, a veterinarian from Queensland, had only just returned to Canberra to set up a laboratory as an independent scientist. Zinkernagel had come to the ANU from Switzerland in 1973 to do his PhD.
The pair happened to share a lab and started talking. A year later, they co-authored two landmark papers in Nature, the Rolls-Royce journal for scientists in all disciplines globally.
Doherty and Zinkernagel had discovered how one critical part of the immune system, the T-cell, recognised and killed virus-infected cells. These killer T-cells patrol our bodies looking for foreign enemies – such as infections or cancer cells – and then move in to attack.
What Doherty and Zinkernagel discovered was the exquisite elegance with which the killer T-cells recognise the enemy.
They proved a radical new idea of how T-cells worked by recognising an “altered self”: the enemy (for example, a virus) could only be recognised when it was presented in combination with the body’s own machinery.
The body’s protein alone or the virus alone didn’t generate the molecular target for the killer T-cell to recognise.
Sounds simple, but the concept was revolutionary.
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At the time, Doherty and Zinkernagel were studying mice infected with a virus called lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). But they and others went on to demonstrate that exactly the same process is used to tackle diseases as diverse as influenza, HIV and cancer. The implications of their findings have been spectacular and far-reaching.
In Doherty’s Nobel speech, given in 1996 in Stockholm, he credited for his success the local intellectual environment in Canberra, the excellence in immunology across Australia and that there was “time to discuss and think things through” in the pre-fax, pre-email days. I suspect there was a bit more to it!
What does it mean for patients?
Doherty and Zinkernagel’s insights into how killer T-cells recognise the enemy proved crucial for understanding how viral infections are controlled. More practically, this understanding now shapes modern treatment strategies for cancer and the design of vaccines.
To recover from the common flu, for example, we need T-cells and antibodies, another arm of the immune system. And recent findings by Katherine Kedzierska, a former trainee with Doherty, have shown how T-cell “memory” protects us against the flu.
Following HIV infection, as in flu, people also generate loads of antibodies and killer T-cells. Neither get rid of HIV completely in anyone. But in some people with the right genetic make-up and the right virus, they manage to keep the virus under control.