Medical Nobels announced.Medical Nobels announced Two Americans won the 1990 Novel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this week for their pioneering work in life-saving organ- and cell-transplant techniques. Joseph E. Murray, a pathfinder in kidney transplants at Brigham and Women's Hospital Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is a hospital in the Longwood Area of the Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Mission Hill. With Massachusetts General Hospital, it is one of the two founding members of Partners HealthCare. in Boston, and bone-marrow specialist E. Donnall Thomas Dr. Edward Donnall (Don) Thomas (b. March 15, 1920) is an American physician, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, and director emeritus of the clinical research division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle will share the prize, worth approximately $700,000. For Murray and Thomas, the Nobel road ran counter to all prevailing medical wisdom and experience. Despite repeated surgical efforts since the turn of the century, virtually all organ transplants had ended in rejection. As recently as the late 1940s, many clinicians deemed the procedure a medical impossibility, with Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar averring that a mysterious biological force "forever will inhibit transplantation from one individual to another." But working first with animals and identical twin and finally with patients unrelated to their donors, the 1990 laureates helped define the poorly understood immunological mechanisms behind organ rejection and applied some of the first ways of overcoming them. In 1954, Murray performed the first successful human kidney transplant -- an operation now repeated with an 80-percent-success rate tens of thousands of times annually among victims of terminal kidney failure kidney failure or renal failure Partial or complete loss of kidney function. Acute failure causes reduced urine output and blood chemical imbalance, including uremia. Most patients recover within six weeks. . He showed that total body irradiation Total Body Irradiation (TBI) is a radiotherapy technique used to ablate the bone marrow and immune system prior to bone marrow transplantation or peripheral blood stem cell transplantation. It may be used as part of high-dose treatment of some leukaemias and lymphomas. reduces the risk of organ rejection, and obtained even better results using a newly developed immunosuppressive drug immunosuppressive drug, any of a variety of substances used to prevent production of antibodies. They are commonly used to prevent rejection by a recipient's body of an organ transplanted from a donor. , azathioprine azathioprine: see metabolite. . Similarly, the bone marrow transplants that each year save thousands of cancer patients' lives have their roots in Thomas' discovery that the drug methotrexate methotrexate, drug used in halting the growth of actively proliferating tissues. Introduced in the 1950s, it is used in the treatment of leukemia, psoriasis, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. can diminish the "graft-versus-host" reaction that otherwise dooms such transplants to failure. The Nobel Committee noted that the researchers' discoveries -- especially impressive given the rudimentary state of immunological knowledge in the 1950s and 1960s -- are in large part responsible for today's wide range of transplant successes on such organs as the heart, pancreas and liver. |
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