Miriam Fauzia of the Dallas Morning News explains that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’s experience with treating melanoma with checkpoint inhibitors, writing:

In the late 2010s, the Cowboys owner and general manager decided to take an experimental drug after being diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma, an advanced form of skin cancer that has spread throughout the body.

This “miracle” drug, he said this week, is called PD-1 therapy. “I went into trials for that PD-1 and it has been one of the great medicines. I now have no tumors.”

Programmed cell death protein 1, or PD-1 for short, is like a stop sign that tells immune cells not to attack healthy cells. But blocking it in cancer encourages the immune system to fight tumors.
Immune might

When Jones, 82, began taking PD-1 therapy, it was a new option for melanoma, a disease long marked by limited treatments and grim outcomes, said Dr. Hussein Tawbi, a melanoma specialist at the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center.

“When I started treating melanoma back in 2005, we didn’t really have any treatment that worked,” Tawbi said. “The median survival for patients was five to seven months; the five-year survival was less than 5%.”

PD-1 and its partner protein, PD-L1, are found on cell surfaces. When PD-L1 latches onto PD-1 on a T cell, it hits the brakes on that immune cell’s activity, preventing friendly fire against healthy tissues.

PD-1 was discovered in 1992 by Dr. Tasuku Honjo, a Japanese physician-scientist at Kyoto University. That discovery, along with that of another protein called CTLA-4 by James Allison, now at MD Anderson, would earn the scientists a joint Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018.

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