Georges Mathé

Georges Mathé (born July 9, 1922 in Sermages , † October 15, 2010 in Villejuif ) was a French physician ( oncologist , immunologist ). He performed the first successful bone marrow transplant (on patients who were not identical twins) in 1959 .

Mathé went to school in Moulins (Allier) , was in the Resistance during the occupation and then studied medicine in Paris, graduating in 1951. In Paris he was in Bernard Halpern's laboratory for immunology from 1948 , where he also met the later Nobel Prize winner Baruj Benacerraf met. In 1951 he was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City , where he was in Joseph H. Burchenal and David A. Karnofsky with leukemia dealt -Research. After returning to Paris he was at the Center for Leukemia in Jean Benard's laboratory , where after a few years he became deputy laboratory manager.

In January 1959 he carried out the first bone marrow transplant on Yugoslav physicists who had been contaminated in an accident in a nuclear power plant in 1958. The transplant he performed on four of the physicists (six had been irradiated, one had previously died) was successful - the patients survived.

In 1961 he became head of the hematology department at the Gustave Roussy Institute (IGR) in Villejuif . In 1964 he founded the Institut de Cancérologie et d'Immuno-génétique (Institute for Oncology and Immunogenetics), where he carried out research on cancer therapy and leukemia. In 1963 he caused a stir with a bone marrow transplant in a leukemia patient (he probably died after 20 months of meningitis), the first allogeneic bone marrow transplant. From 1966 to 1990 he was Professor of Experimental Oncology at the University of Paris . In 1980 he founded the Maladies Sanguines et Tumorales service in the Paul-Brousse Hospital in Villejuif in the south of Paris, which he headed until 1988. Even after his time as a professor in Paris, he remained active and turned to AIDS therapy.

Mathé was the first to describe the graft-versus-host reaction (GvHR) in bone marrow transplantation in 1959 . In 1965 he introduced the term adoptive immunotherapy.

In 1962 he was co-founder and until 1966 first president of the Groupe Europeén de Chimiothérapie Anticancéreuse (GECA, from 1968 EORTC ).

He was less successful in the 1970s with immunotherapy against acute leukemia with the help of vaccination with the BCG bacterium, which he enforced emphatically in Paris, even when its ineffectiveness was already becoming apparent.

Mathé published over 1000 scientific articles.

Mathé was also politically influential in France in the science organization after De Gaulle became aware of him early on. He was involved in founding the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). He was also the founder and first president of the Society of Medical Oncology (SMIC, which later became the European Society for Medical Oncology , ESMO).

In 1994 he received the Léopold Griffuel Prize . He received the Cameron Price, the Gold Medal of the Ciba Foundation, the Johan Georg Zimmermann Prize, the Prix Bred du Cancer, the International Award of chemotherapy, the Gotlieb Memorial Award, the Medawar Prize (2002) and the Grande Médaille of the French Academy of Medicine. He was a member of the Royal Society of Medicine and the New York Academy of Sciences .

Fonts

with J. Bernard, L. Schwarzenberg, MJ Larrieu, CM Lalanne, A. Dutrix, PF Denoix, J. Surmont, V. Schwarzmann, B. Ceoara: Essai de traitement des sujets atteints de leucemie aigue en remission par irradiation totale suivie de transfusion de moelle osseuse homologue , Revues Francaises d'Etudes Cliniques et Biologiques, Volume 4, 1959, pp. 675-704
with J. Bernard, L. Schwarzenberg New trials with homologous bone marrow grafts after total irradiation in children with acute leucemia in remission. The problem of the secondary syndrome in man. Revues Hematologique (Paris), Volume 15, 1960, pp. 115-161

Web links

Obituary in the New York Times, October 20, 2010
Obituary from the American Society for Clinical Oncology, ASCO
Obituary in The Lancet
Georges Mathé on the website of the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé, Paris.

Individual evidence

^ Mathé, JL Amiel, L. Schwarzenberg, A. Cattan, M. Schneider Adoptive immunotherapy of acute leucaemia: experimental and clinical results , Cancer Research, Volume 25, 1965, pp. 1525-1531.

personal data
SURNAME	Mathé, Georges
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French medic
DATE OF BIRTH	July 9, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH	Sermages
DATE OF DEATH	October 15, 2010
Place of death	Villejuif

[1] Mathé, JL Amiel, L. Schwarzenberg, A. Cattan, M. Schneider Adoptive immunotherapy of acute leucaemia: experimental and clinical results , Cancer Research, Volume 25, 1965, pp. 1525-1531.