Nobel Prize-Winning Immunologist Jim Allison, Subject of Documentary 'Breakthrough,' on Following Facts and Why Film Brought Him to 'Tears'

Bill Haney's doc on remarkable cancer researcher now playing in theaters

Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher Jim Allison, subject of "Breakthrough." Photo courtesy Uncommon Productions/ Dada Films

"Facts are stubborn things," President John Adams once said. That dictum has been put to the test of late - an era in our history that has seen an increasing disregard for empirical evidence, motivated by political considerations.

"Facts and hard work are kind of not sexy things in America right now," filmmaker Bill Haney notes. "Facts are - what do we call them now? Quasi facts, false facts, made up facts, my facts."

One researcher who, fortunately, doesn't traffic in "quasi" facts is Dr. Jim Allison, the Nobel Prize-winning immunologist and subject of Haney's new documentary, Jim Allison: Breakthrough. He has built his career - and unlocked mysteries that have led to life-saving cancer treatments - by strictly following evidence-based results.
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Facts are facts.

--Dr. Jim Allison, subject of Breakthrough

"Facts are facts. You do an experiment and you get an answer and sometimes it won't be the answer you were looking for. Or sometimes it will be the answer to a different question than you asked," Allison tells Nonfictionfilm.com. "But you've got to recognize all of that in the data. Data's an incredibly powerful thing. It comes from somewhere and it's based in reality and you've just got to think about what it means. But think down the road. Where's this going to take me? If this is true, what? What's next?"

Breakthrough is now playing in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Berkeley, California (where Allison used to do his research) and Houston (where he currently works, as chair of immunology at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas). The film opens in the coming days and weeks in Austin, Texas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cambridge, Massachusetts and other cities (check here for details). 

Allison's vital contributions have come in the study of T-cells, a type of cell that plays a crucial role in the body's immune response. T-cells fight off illness by recognizing disease agents and eliminating them; one of Allison's fundamental insights was to question why T-cells should not be effective in neutralizing cancerous tumors.

"I was impressed early on when I started learning about the immune system about transplant rejection, for example. You put the wrong kidney or liver or whatever, the immune system will take out a whole organ in short order. And so, if it can do that, why can't it take out cancer?" Allison explains. "At the time people were saying, ‘Oh, it'll take out small cancers.’ No, I don't think so. There's the example [organ rejection]. Looking at that got me excited... If we could just figure out what holds it together we could take advantage of that incredible power."
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Allison felt early research in the field was leading to suspect conclusions.

"I got the literature and ran all this stuff... This was voodoo to me. It didn't make any sense. There was no concept or anything," he recalls. "I just decided as a rule I was not going to necessarily be swayed by stuff just because it was published. In fact at that point I just said, 'I'm rejecting everything that's out there and I'm going to start over with a blank slate.'"

Director Bill Haney (left) with Dr. Jim Allison, subject of his film. Photo courtesy Uncommon Productions

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Related:
>Breakthrough director Bill Haney talks Jim Allison at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival: 'He's so full of empathy and spirit'

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"You could see people were wandering the path, they got to a wall and they stood there," Haney says of that early, less than fruitful research. "I think there was a stage where Jim said, 'Okay, following the path isn't getting me anywhere. I'm going absolutely off into the woods. I'm going backpacking north. I'm just going to follow the sun.' And it turned out it took him to a glorious clearing."

The clearing, which took decades of research and scientific analysis to reach, involved understanding both how T-cells worked to kill invasive cells and how cancerous cells managed, deviously, to short circuit a T-cell's killing capacity. The Nobel Prize committee describes his insights this way:

"In 1994–1995, Allison studied a known protein that functions as a brake on the immune system," the Nobel committee explains. "He realized the potential of releasing the brake and thereby unleashing our immune cells to attack tumors. He then developed this concept into a new approach for treating patients."

Allison's work led directly to the development of ipilimumab (trade name Yervoy), a drug that has saved the lives of cancer patients, including Sharon Belvin, a young woman who appears in Breakthrough.

"How in the world are you supposed to adequately thank somebody that, without them, you wouldn't be here?" Belvin asks.

And ad for ipilimumab (trade name Yervoy).

Breakthrough explores what motivated Allison to pursue his research. The tragedy of losing his mother to cancer, when Jim was just 11, would eventually set him on that course. The film contains home movies of Allison with his mother when he was a toddler - footage he had never seen before the documentary was made.

"I had these little cans of movies that my dad passed [on to me]. I had no idea what was on them until Bill and [producer] Jennifer [Pearce] and their teams got a hold of them," Allison reveals. "I had one black-and-white and one sort of sepia toned photo of my mother and that's all I had.  Bill's team reconstructed those [home movies]... I was thrilled to have a chance to actually see my mother, see her holding [me], knowing there was a time, because that was something that was not in my memory. I was just completely unaware of."

He saw those images for the first time at the film's world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival.

"I shed quite a few tears over that," Allison confirms. "I had no idea."

"I think it was my favorite part of the entire experience because we found this footage in the house Jim lived at in Berkeley," Haney observes. "These canisters... were all destroyed. We were told there was nothing could be salvaged. We found an aged craftsman who rebuilds by half a frame at a time, over a long period of time, who could build four seconds... What you've seen in the movie is the sum total available."

Jim Allison receiving the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2018. Next to him is fellow recipient Tasuku Honjo. Photo courtesy Uncommon Productions/Dada Films

Allison would need exceptional fortitude to overcome that early loss of his mother, and later to persist in his scientific explorations when the cancer research establishment almost unanimously viewed his immunological approach as completely wrong-headed.

​"His resilience is rooted in a lot of ways in the adaptive resistance to stress and challenge he had already formed as an 11-year-old," after his mother's death, Haney told me when we spoke previously at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina. "He was already surviving in some ways on his own at 11 years old and in so many ways he had positioned himself to be able to handle the resistance."

There are intangibles to Allison's success - like the origins of his iconoclastic streak that in high school prompted him to defy a science teacher who wouldn't teach Darwin's theory of evolution. He also had the ability to draw talented people to his lab, in part because he was simply fun to be around - whether at work or jamming on harmonica (he's known to play on occasion with fellow Texan Willie Nelson), enjoying a brew or shot of whiskey. 

"There's a series of unique characteristics that if you're in the 5-percent of the most imaginative scientists, that's great," Haney observes, "and then you're in the 5-percent most compelling leaders, that's great. And if you're in the five-percent most determined folks, then that's great. And if you're in the 5-percent most persuasive folks, that's great. And if you're in the five-percent most resilient folks, that's great. And all of a sudden we’re in 5 to the fifth [power] and now you're getting to the people who are doing really extraordinary things."

Jim Allison delivers his Nobel lecture in Stockholm in 2018. Photo from NobelPrize.org

Allison has won numerous awards for his research, but the Nobel Prize is in a class of its own. For the 2018 presentation ceremony in Stockholm, Allison was obliged to wear formal attire. Anyone who has seen him in a honky tonk wailing on harmonica will allow he seems far more at ease in that environment than appearing before Swedish nobility dressed in a tuxedo.

"It took about an hour and a half to get that stuff on," Allison admits. "I got a lot of stuff wrong and figured it out the next day. There were these straps on the bottom of the shirt that are supposed to be buttoned on buttons on your pants leg. Whoever heard of that? I felt like it was a costume party or something. I must admit I was kind of uncomfortable."