Peter Perlmann

Peter Perlmann ( 1919 - April 19, 2005 in Stockholm ) was a Swedish immunologist . He was a professor at Stockholm University .

Life

Perlmann fled as a Jew after the German occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) to Sweden, where he studied biology in Lund and chemistry in Stockholm with a candidate degree in 1948 and a licentiate degree in 1953. He initially dealt with developmental biology and was in 1957 with John Runnström (1888–1971) at the Wenner Gren Institute in Stockholm is doing his doctorate with a thesis in which he used immunological methods to identify antigens on the surface of sea ​​urchin eggs . Later he examined, for example, enzyme complexes on liver cells and UC ( ulcerative colitis ), an autoimmune disease , where he demonstrated the cytotoxicity of lymphocytes from UC patients on normal intestinal cells in cultures. With his students he studied the mechanisms by which lymphocytes cause cell death , including discovering ADCC (Antibody dependent cell mediated cytotoxicity). He worked on tumor immunology, especially in bladder cancer, and from the late 1970s on malaria immunology. In 1983 he discovered a new malaria antigen Pf155, which offered opportunities for vaccine development. He also researched the exact mechanism of malaria's pathogenic effects in the brain (via the release of cytokines and the clogging of small blood vessels by infected red blood cells that clump together with others).

Perlmann and his student Eva Engvall developed the ELISA technique ( enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay ), in which proteins are detected with antibodies. The technology has found multiple applications in a wide variety of areas, from pregnancy detection to diagnostic detection of parasites and AIDS viruses .

In 1978 he received the Emil von Behring Prize . In 1976 he and Engvall received the Biochemical Analysis Prize . He was an honorary doctor of the Karolinska Institute and was on the award committee for the Nobel Prize for Medicine. He received the Avery Landsteiner Award, the Colombian Order of San Carlos, the Eric Fernström Prize, and the Bioscience Laboratories Prize. From 1989 to 1991 he was a Fogarty Fellow at the National Institutes of Health .

He was married to Hedvig Perlmann, with whom he had collaborated scientifically since the 1950s.

swell

• Engvall et al., Obituary in Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, Volume 63, 2006, p. 487.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Immunochem. 8, 1971, p. 871