Edward Donall Thomas 2

 

Edward Donall Thomas 2

The bone marrow transplant, the Nobel Prize and the death of Dr. Edward Donnall Thomas

The bone marrow transplant, the Nobel Prize and the death of Dr. Edward Donnall Thomas

From a surgical point of view, bone marrow transplantation is the simplest of all transplants. Currently, in most cases, it is not even necessary to puncture the bone marrow, it is enough to stimulate the donor with filgrastim, so that after four to five days we can obtain, through apheresis, hematopoietic cells in enormous quantities, the same that allow the recipient to change his entire immune and hematopoietic system. This is a formidable challenge, changing this system in a human is the most difficult of the biological tasks that transplant doctors carry out. All of us who currently work in this field have to thank those who preceded us and endured the human hardships inherent in medical work. For this reason, we deeply regret the loss of a pioneering doctor in this field, who had the courage, imagination and perseverance to start a new frontier in medical knowledge. His drive and leadership was a decisive factor for the initial development in hematopoietic cell transplantation. Not surprisingly, he is one of the few clinicians who has received the Nobel Prize in recent years.

 

Dr. Edward Donnall Thomas, pioneer of hematopoietic cell transplantation, passed away on October 20. Born in Mart, Texas on March 15, 1920, Dr. Thomas was the son of Edward E. Thomas, a country physician, and Angie Hill Donnall Thomas, a teacher. Dr. Thomas did the first bone marrow cell transplant in 1956, before HLA leukocyte antigens were known. The rejection of the transplanted cells gave rise to studies that showed that leukocyte antigen matching was necessary to achieve a durable engraftment. In 1969, Dr. Thomas performed the first successful donor-recipient transplant other than identical twins. In 1988 he was named president of the American Society of Hematology.

 

In 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, sharing this honor with Dr. Joseph E. Murray, a pioneer in the field of kidney transplantation. Both Dr. Thomas and Dr. Murray had been fellow interns at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, and both managed to solve the problem that had prevented the success of human-to-human organ transplants, namely rejection reactions. . Dr. Thomas investigated numerous immunosuppressive drugs and discovered the efficacy of methotrexate in preventing rejection and graft-versus-host disease; he retired in 1989. The same year that Dr. Thomas was awarded the Nobel Prize, Octavio Paz, a Mexican writer, also received this outstanding distinction. One early fall morning, a reporter woke Dr. Thomas up to break the news of the announcement in Sweden and interview him. When his wife, Dorothy (Dottie), overheard him talking about transplants, she asked him what he was doing giving an interview at that hour. Don replied, "We won the Nobel Prize." The use of the plural was deliberate. Although Dottie's name did not appear on the award Murray and Thomas won, Murray said that his wife, his colleagues, associates and patients had helped him obtain it. Humble, he explained that it had not been an individual effort, but a collective one. Although he had some financial needs, like trading in his old Datsun pickup, he donated the entire $350,000 he received from the Nobel Prize to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), where he worked for decades.

 

In April 1994, Dr. Thomas came to the XXV World Congress of Hematology that was held in Cancun, Mexico, during which he gave one of the keynote addresses. On those same dates he was named Honorary Member of the National Academy of Medicine of Mexico, being then its president. Dr. Carlos Campillo. Dr. Ricardo Sosa Sánchez, a recently deceased Mexican hematologist, was the first Mexican student of Dr. Thomas at the FHCRC, and upon his return to Mexico he performed the first hematopoietic cell transplant in the country in 1980, putting into practice the knowledge he had acquired at the FHCRC, under the tutelage of Dr. Thomas.

 

The work of Dr. Thomas laid the foundations for the practice, now routine of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplants, which have saved many lives of patients with leukemia and other hematological diseases in which hematopoietic tissue replacement can be curative.

 

Dr. Thomas himself said: "There was a time when a diagnosis of leukemia was a death sentence. The chances of survival were close to zero." These times have changed and a good part of the changes have been supported by the work of Dr. E. D. Thomas. rest in peace.

 

 

Source:

University magazine

Hematology Service, "Dr. José Eleuterio González" University Hospital.

 

Monterrey, N.l, Mexico.

 

With affection,

Ruben