Tasuku Honjo

Tasuku Honjo (本庶 佑, Honjo Tasuku; born January 27, 1942) is a Japanese physician-scientist and immunologist. He won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and is best known for his identification of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1). He is also known for his molecular identification of cytokinesIL-4 and IL-5, as well as the discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.

He was elected as an international member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in 2001, a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2003, and as a member of the Japan Academy in 2005. In 2018, he was awarded a Nobel Prize with James P. Allison. He and Allison together had won the 2014 Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science for the same achievement.