Word: riggio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Another promising approach was reported by Dr. Robert R. Riggio and his co-workers at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. Riggio was aware that women produce large amounts of antibodies during pregnancy, specifically in response to the fetus, yet somehow manage to tolerate this "foreign" tissue in their bodies. He therefore wondered whether the baby might actually be stimulating the production of "blocking antibodies" within the mother that neutralize her immune reaction against the fetus. If so, perhaps the same response could be artificially produced in transplant recipients...
...test his theory, Riggio has been injecting gamma globulin from human placentas, which are usually discarded after delivery, into patients at the hospital's Rogosin Kidney Center. He hopes that the placental extract will transfer blocking antibodies into them. That then might encourage acceptance of new organs. A positive sign: when Riggio examined long-term transplant survivors at the center, he found that their acceptance of kidney grafts somehow appeared to have been enhanced by a biochemical mechanism similar to that postulated in pregnant women...
Neither Rapaport nor Riggio can yet fully explain such effects, but they think that in successful transplants there apparently has been a tilt in the balance of immune cells toward those that tolerate specific foreign tissue rather than reject it. In short, the immunological blunderbuss can be replaced by a more accurate biochemical rifle...