Raising the Tail: Jim Allison’s Pioneering Cancer Treatment

This excerpt is from an article by Jenny Blair, published May 2, 2014 in The Alcalde:

In 2004, two weeks before her wedding day, 22-year-old Sharon Belvin was diagnosed with advanced melanoma. The cancer had spread through her lungs, and after five months of chemotherapy, doctors found it had invaded her brain. Her odds weren’t good: at the time, 10-year survival rates for stage IV melanoma hovered around 10-15 percent.

But a cancer-free Belvin appeared on video at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Mountain View, Calif., last December, and she credits Jim Allison, BA ’69, PhD ’73, with saving her life. Belvin’s tumors vanished after she received anti-CTLA-4, a then-experimental drug now known as ipilimumab.

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