An Israeli-born Weizmann Institute of Science specialist in bone marrow transplants left this week for Moscow to aid patients suffering marrow damage from radiation poisoning as a result of the Soviet nuclear plant accident at Chernobyl last month.
The Israeli expert is Dr. Yair Reisner, affiliated with the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot since 1981, and currently working at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Two other bone marrow experts–Drs. Paul Terasaki and Richard Gale–also left New York for Moscow with Reisner to aid the patients.
Reisner’s revolutionary method of bone marrow purification, developed while at Sloan-Kettering, has been used in more than 160 marrow transplants. The success rate has been 70 percent in children with leukemia and 60 percent in children with genetic defects that deprive them of immune defenses.
While Terasaki specializes in getting the closest possible match between the patient’s body and the transplanted marrow, Reisner’s method cleanses donated marrow of cells that cause the rejection, according to a spokesperson for the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute.
DESCRIPTION OF REISNER’S TECHNIQUE
Diseased marrow cells are first destroyed by a massive dose of radiation. Reisner’s technique then calls for about a quart of marrow to be extracted from the donor’s hip bone, after which that marrow is exposed to lectin, a chemical extracted from peanuts, to remove the T-cells that cause rejection.
Purified marrow cells are injected into the recipient’s bloodstream. They find their way to the bones, establish themselves and begin to reproduce.
Reisner and his colleagues at Sloan-Kettering and the Weizmann Institute developed the medical breakthrough to perform transplants, on “incompatible,” genetically unrelated individuals. Bone marrow transplants, as in many other types of skin and organ transplants can result in the grafted organ being rejected by the host.
In order to prevent rejection by the host, Reisner and his colleagues worked to develop the cell separation technique. It was an outgrowth of 20 years of research by Dr. Nathan Sharon, head of the Weizmann Institute’s Biophysics Department and Reisner’s mentor.
In 1978, Sharon’s findings, published in a science journal, drew the attention of Dr. Robert Good, then at Sloan-Kettering and a leading innovator in cancer research. Good invited Reisner–then a doctoral student at the Institute in Rehovot who had been working closely with Sharon on the soybean lectin bone marrow connection–to be a research associate at Sloan-Kettering.
Over the next few years, Reisner worked with members of the Sloan-Kettering staff to advance and refine the cell separation technique. Starting in December, 1980, physicians at Sloan-Kettering used the technique to perform the first of a series of successful bone marrow transplants. Reisner holds the Dr. Phil Gold Career Development Chair in cancer research at the Weizmann Institute.
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