William Pollack

William Pollack (born February 26, 1926 in North-Kensington, London , † November 3, 2013 in Yorba Linda , California ) was a British-American chemist and immunologist , known for developing a vaccine against Rh factor intolerance in pregnant women .

Life

Pollack served in the Royal Navy during World War II and after the war he studied chemistry at Imperial College London with a bachelor's degree in 1948. He then studied at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London with a master's degree in chemistry in 1950 and 1948 until 1954 in pathology at St. George's Hospital (Hyde Park Corner). In 1954 he moved to British Columbia , where he did research at the Royal Columbian Hospital in Vancouver. In 1963 he moved to the pharmaceutical company Ortho Pharmaceutical in Raritan, New Jersey, and began developing a rhesus factor vaccine. He became Vice President and Director of Research for Ortho Pharmaceutical. During his time in New Jersey, he also earned a Ph.D.in Zoology from Rutgers University . He taught immunology at Rutgers University and Columbia University. After 25 years at Ortho Pharmaceutical, he joined the Purdue-Frederick pharmaceutical company in Connecticut and later founded his own pharmaceutical company, Quotient Pharmaceuticals Manufacturing in Anaheim , California.

plant

Pollack isolated the crucial antigens for the development of the vaccine (anti-D-immunoglobulin, Rho (D) -immunoglobulin, Rho-GAM). Co-developers were Vincent J. Freda and John G. Gorman from the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, who won the Lasker ~ DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award with Pollack in 1980 (as did the British group around Ronald Finn , Cyril A. Clarke ). The vaccine was first developed in rabbits and then tested on male volunteer prisoners in Sing Sing before a clinical test on 600 rhesus incompatible patients with a success rate of 99 percent.

Ronald Finn's group in Liverpool also worked independently on the development of a Rh factor vaccine, and Pollack supported Finn by handing over antibodies when Finn visited his laboratory. Finn had the idea of eliminating the rhesus-positive blood cells of the fetus in the bloodstream of the rhesus-negative mother by injecting antibodies and thus preventing the mother from being immunized against the child's blood cells (this usually occurs in the mother only after the first birth of a rhesus incompatible Child and can lead to the dreaded complications in subsequent pregnancies). Theobald Smith had already demonstrated the possibility of such a procedure in 1909 with diphtheria toxin antibodies. Freda, Gorman and Pollack built on this and showed in 1962/63 that the administration of the antibodies in the first 72 hours after injection of a rhesus factor antigen prevented immunization.

Introduced in 1969, the vaccine practically eliminated the cases of Rh factor incompatibility in advanced industrialized nations such as the United States, which previously caused around 10,000 baby deaths there annually. The WHO recommended vaccination as the standard procedure in 1971 and stated in 1998 that the incompatibility cases previously estimated at around 200,000 had become rare worldwide.

He had been married since 1954 and had two sons.

Fonts

W. Pollack, JG Gorman, VJ Freda: Intramuscular injection of new experimental -globulin preparation containing high levels of Anti-Rh antibody as means of preventing sensitization to Rh, Proc. 9th Congress Intern. Society Hematology, Vol. 2, 1962, p. 545. ${\ displaystyle \ gamma _ {2}}$
W. Pollack, JG Gorman, VJ Freda: Successfull prevention of experimental Rh-sensitization in man with an anti-Rh- -globulin antibody preparation, J. Immunol. Transf., Vol. 4, 1964, p. 26. ${\ displaystyle \ gamma _ {2}}$
W. Pollack, JG Gorman, VJ Freda: Prevention of isoimmunization to the Rh-factor using high titer anti-Rh- globulin, Proc. 10th Congress Int. Soc.Blood Transf (Stockholm 1964), 1965, p. 949. ${\ displaystyle \ gamma}$
W. Pollack, JG Gorman, HJ Hager, VJ Freda, D. Tripodi: Antibody-mediated immune suppression to the Rh-factor: Animal models suggesting mechanism of action, Transfusion, Volume 8, 1968, p. 134.
W. Pollack, JG Gorman, VJ Freda, WQ Ascari, AE Allen, WJ Baker: Results of clinical tests of RhoGAM in women, Transfusion (NY), Volume 8, 1968, p. 151.
W. Pollack, JG Gorman, VJ Freda, ER Jennings, JF Sullivan, GH Hill: Clinical evaluation of Rh-immunoglobulin in the prophylaxis of immunization of the Rh-factor, Bibl. Haemat., Volume 29, 1968, p. 231.

literature

John T. Queenan, Jörg Schneider: Practical clinical aspects of Rh-prophylaxis, J. Perinat. Med., Volume 1, 1973, p. 223, pdf

Web links

Obituary in the Daily Telegraph, November 25, 2013

Individual evidence

↑ They belonged to Johnson & Johnson and mainly developed contraception aids
↑ He wrote his dissertation in Liverpool in 1961 and published with Cyril A. Clarke and others: Experimental studies on the prevention of Rh-haemolytic disease, British Medical Journal, Volume 1, 1961, p. 1486.
↑ As also John G. Gorman and Vincent J. Freda in the USA, see Acknowledgment of the Lasker Foundation .

personal data
SURNAME	Pollack, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British-American immunologist and chemist
DATE OF BIRTH	February 26, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH	London
DATE OF DEATH	3rd November 2013
Place of death	Yorba Linda

[1] They belonged to Johnson & Johnson and mainly developed contraception aids

[2] He wrote his dissertation in Liverpool in 1961 and published with Cyril A. Clarke and others: Experimental studies on the prevention of Rh-haemolytic disease, British Medical Journal, Volume 1, 1961, p. 1486.

[3] As also John G. Gorman and Vincent J. Freda in the USA, see Acknowledgment of the Lasker Foundation .