The effect of cyclophosphamide and antilymphocytic serum on the cellular reactions to homologous skin implanted into brain

1970 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ridley
1970 ◽  
Vol 63 (9) ◽  
pp. 949-950
Author(s):  
A J Woiwod

1970 ◽  
Vol 63 (9) ◽  
pp. 951-953
Author(s):  
Keith James

1970 ◽  
Vol 72 (6) ◽  
pp. 959
Author(s):  
KORNEL GIBIŃSKI

BMJ ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 2 (5604) ◽  
pp. 533-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Hellmann ◽  
R. I. Hawkins ◽  
S. Whitecross

1969 ◽  
Vol 174 (1035) ◽  
pp. 155-172 ◽  

‘Immunosuppressive agents’ are precisely what their name implies: agents that weaken or abolish the immunological response. The term itself promises more than any agent has in fact achieved. Strictly speaking, an immunosuppressive drug or treatment should be one that inhibits the immune response and no other. A central theme of this lecture is that only antilymphocytic serum (hereafter ALS) comes anywhere near fulfilling the requirements of this definition. The immunosuppressive action of all other agents in common use is a byproduct of some much more general toxic or inhibitory influence which happens to affect, amongst many others, the cells that transact the immunological response. For this reason immunosuppressive agents have not yet begun to do for immunology what specific metabolic inhibitors have done for the analysis of cellular metabolism—to resolve a complex biological performance into separate episodes or cellular events. Our knowledge of how they work is purely empirical; it has been pieced together from the evidence of practical experience, rather than founded on a prior theoretical understanding of how they work. Immunosuppressive agents owe their importance to the sheer pressure of medical necessity. Diseases or disabilities that are due to immunological failure or insufficiency—e. g. to a congenital insufficiency of blood proteins of the class to which antibodies belong—are less common and less perplexing than those which can be attributed to a miscarriage or abnormal manifestation of the immunological response. Hay fever, asthma, urticaria and the allergies generally, including drug and bacterial allergies; anaphylaxis and serum sickness; haemolytic disease of the newborn; blood transfusion incompatibilities and that rather different form of incompatibility which prohibits the grafting of tissues from one individual to another; the so-called ‘auto-immune’ diseases, whether primary or secondary, including auto-immune thyroiditis and some of the so-called collagen diseases—all these are, to a greater or lesser degree, miscarriages or misadventures of the immunological response. There can therefore be no question of the strength of the practical incentive to bringing the immunological response under control.


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