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Breakthrough Blood Sample |
Meanwhile, reactions to someone else's blood were also of interest to blood specialist Harvey Alter at the NIH Blood Bank. Alter wanted to find out why some patients developed fever, chills, or rashes after blood transfusions. He thought they might be suffering from immune reactions to foreign proteins (antigens ) in donated blood. When Alter learned that Blumberg was looking for immune reactions in the blood of patients who had received many transfusions, he went to see him, and they decided to collaborate.
Blumberg and Alter used agar gel diffusion to test sera from patients who had received multiple transfusions (for example, hemophilia and leukemia patients) against panels of serum in Blumberg's international collection from people of widely varied origins. In 1963, after months of experiments, the researchers discovered that serum from a New York hemophilia patient reacted with serum from a person residing in the opposite corner of the world--an Australian aborigine. This finding was not unusual in itself; up to that point, the transfused patients' blood in these experiments had reacted with high frequency to other sera, indicating that the patients had been exposed to many common antigens through transfusions. As a result, though, it had not been possible to draw any definitive conclusions as to which antigen or antigens were causing the reaction--until now. It turned out that in the particular experiment with the Australian aborigine's serum, only one of 24 hemophilia patients' sera reacted with it. The significance of this was exciting, for it implied that a single and rare antigen was causing the reaction. So what was the antigen? Since it occurred only rarely, it was unlikely to be an antigen caused by genetic variation in human blood. Instead, it was more likely to be from an infectious source.
Intrigued by this question, although still not working on hepatitis B directly, Blumberg and Alter tested the serum of the hemophiliac in question against thousands of serum samples. They found that samples from only one in 1,000 healthy nonhemophiliac American blood donors reacted with the hemophiliac's serum, whereas samples from one in 10 of the leukemia patients reacted. Whatever antigen in the Australian aborigine's blood had caused the reaction in Blumberg and Alter's tests was also found often in the blood of leukemia patients. Moreover, the antigen was rarely found in normal patients' blood but frequently in hemophiliacs and leukemia patients. The researchers labeled the mysterious protein Australian antigen (Aa) in reference to the homeland of the aborigine whose blood led to its discovery. They hypothesized that an unknown antigen in the Australian aborigine's blood was reacting with antibodies in the blood of certain hemophilia and leukemia patients.
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 | | | All About Blood - From the American Association of Blood Banks. This site has information about blood, blood banking, and blood screening--and a page on the highlights of transfusion history. |  | | Hepatitis B - More information on Hepatitis B from the American Liver Foundation. | | | Understanding the Immune System - A detailed introduction to the immune system, including a section on antibodies. | | | Yellow Fever and the Reed Commission - An interesting historical article on yellow fever and the Spanish-American War. |  |
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