The entrepreneur behind the cancer immunotherapy revolution
Nils Lonberg, a scientist at the center of a revolution in cancer therapy, has had a career full of fateful decisions. One of the most crucial: buying an entire bottle of whiskey at a hotel bar.
It was 1998. Lonberg had just been part of a group dinner with Jim Allison, the charismatic, harmonica-playing scientist who would go on to win a Nobel Prize. After the meal, Lonberg took Allison aside and invited him to have a drink; they stayed up drinking, and talking, until the wee small hours of the morning.
Allison had been trying to find a company to turn his discoveries into life-changing medicines. Lonberg, at the time an executive at a small company, wanted to be the one to make it happen.
“He felt like he’d been, I don’t know, toyed with by companies in the past, and they were just kind of moving slowly and not really serious about it,” Lonberg recalled. “I convinced him we would move quickly. So we did move quickly.”
When Lonberg retired to his room, his head still swimming from booze, he sat down and scribbled out several pages of notes documenting their conversation. He wanted to be able to remember exactly what mattered to his new partner.
It would be 20 years before Allison was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for helping to show how the immune system could be harnessed to fight tumors. But what’s often not appreciated is the degree to which Lonberg and his longtime colleague, Alan Korman,
