Georg F. Springer

Georg F. Springer (born February 29, 1924 in Berlin , † March 10, 1998 in North Field (Illinois) ) was a German-born American doctor ( immunology , cancer research) who developed an immunotherapy against cancer.

Springer was a great-grandson of the publisher Julius Springer , the founder of Springer Science + Business Media . From 1942 he was a tank soldier on the Eastern Front, where he was seriously wounded. After his release from US prisoner-of-war captivity in 1945, he studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg (graduating in 1947 summa cum laude ) and received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Basel in 1951, summa cum laude . He also studied organic chemistry with Tadeus Reichstein and undertook histological cancer studies. After receiving his doctorate, he went to the University of Pennsylvania , where he studied with P. György and Richard Kuhn , among other things, he deepened his studies in immunochemistry, pediatrics and pathology. 1954 to 1956 he headed an immunology research group at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC in 1956 he became an assistant professor and 1961 associate professor of immunopathology at the University of Pennsylvania and headed the analysis of blood banks for the city of Philadelphia. In 1963 he became professor of microbiology and immunology at Northwestern University Medical School and director of immunochemistry research at Evanston Hospital. From 1977 to 1989 he moved to a chair in surgery at Northwestern University and from 1989 he was Professor of Immunology, Microbiology and Surgery and Head of the Heather Margaret Bligh Cancer Research Laboratories at Chicago Medical School (University of Health Sciences, UHS) in North Chicago . The laboratory is named after his wife, who died of breast cancer. Springer then turned to cancer research and financed the laboratory largely from his own private funds.

In the 1950s at the University of Pennsylvania he discovered that A and B antigens of the human blood groups also occur in many plants and bacteria and, using the example of chickens, he demonstrated that the formation of antibodies against A, B is caused by the presence of the corresponding antigens in the Environment of the chickens: if the corresponding antigens were missing in the environment in which the chickens grew up, they would not produce antibodies against them.

At the University of Chicago, he mainly dealt with the T antigen (Thomsen-Friedenreich antigen, a glycoprotein discovered in 1927) and its precursor, the Tn antigen, which (as he proved) are detectable in many human cancer cells and only in normal cells in "masked" form on the cell surface. He demonstrated their usefulness in the early diagnosis of breast cancer and developed an immunotherapy against cancer based on it, in which T and Tn antigens from prepared human red blood cells, provided with two adjuvants, are inoculated. These therapeutic approaches were very controversial at the time (late 1970s), but similar approaches were later pursued by many research groups.

In 1966 he received the Franz Oehlecker Medal of the German Society for Transfusion Medicine and Immunohematology, in 1975 the Abbott Laboratories Award in Biomedicine, the Julia S. Michaels Investigator in Surgical Oncology Award and in 1977 the Ernst Jung Prize .

Fonts

• T and Tn, general carcinoma autoantigens , Science, Volume 224, 1984, pp. 1198-1206

Web links

• Obituary in Glycobiology, Volume 9, 1999

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Springer Inhibition of blood group agglutinins by substances occuring in plants , J. Immunology, Volume 76, 1956, p. 399, Chemistry and biology of mucopolysaccharides , Ciba Foundation Symposium 1958, Some aspects of the possibilities and limits of modern "germ-free" methods for the Vertebrate Immunology, Journal for Immunity Research, Volume 118, 1959, p. 228, Springer, R. Horton, M. Forbes Origin of anti-human blood group B agglutinins in white leghorn chickens , J. Exp. Med., Volume 110, 1959, P. 221