• DOI:10.1111/j.1398-9995.1993.tb00687.x
• Corpus ID: 36262710

The discovery of IgE

@article{Stanworth1993TheDO,
  title={The discovery of IgE},
  author={Denis R. Stanworth},
  journal={Allergy},
  year={1993},
  volume={48}
}

• D. Stanworth
• Published 1 July 1987
• Medicine, Chemistry
• Allergy

To the protein chetiiist intent on explaining biologic activity of immunoglobulins in structural terms, IgE poses a formidable but rewarding challenge. I have been privileged to work on this topic for the last 37 years, having previously undertaken what has come to be recognized as the first serious attempt (18) to characterize chemically a major inhalant allergen (from horse dander). Consequently, I was in a key position to witness and participate in the exciting and sometimes dramatic events which culminated in the discovery of IgE. As we look back on those early days, it is difficult to imagine now that so inuch progress could have been made since on the characterization of anaphylactic antibodies. At that time, they were referred to by the noncommittal term "reagin" (coined by Coca and Grove in 1925). And, as I wrote in a review article (20), as late as 1963, there was still doubt about their antibody status. Unlike antibodies of the then known immunoglobulin classes, they failed to give a precipitin reaction when incubated with a specific antigen (allergen), and they appeared not to fix complement in vitro. Admittedly, Von Pirquet had expressed (as early as 1906) a belief that an antibody-antigen reaction was the basis of allergic phenomena. But it was not until the pioneering work of Prausnitz (1921) (16) in Germany that a candidate antibody was demonstrated to be present in the sera of allergic persons and to be capable of transferring immediate hypersensitivity to the skin of normal human recipients. For the next 40 years or more, the Prausnitz-Kustner (P-K) test, as it came to be called, offered the only means of assaying reagin (reaginic antibody) activity. Even in the pre-AIDS era, there was still the risk of transferring the hepatitis virus through blood serum, and, inevitably, this was a tremendous handicap in attempts to characterize this most elusive of antibodies. As far as my own early work in this area was concerned, there was an additional constraint because the then head of the department of experimental pathology at Birmingham University (the late John Squire) insisted that all P-K tests be performed on him personally (on his back) with serum (or reagin-rich fractions) from just one donor ("PR"), a member of our technical staff who was very allergic to horses and who had no clinical history of hepatitis. As P-K test sites are refractory for about 1 month afterwards, and as professors tend to spend substantial periods of time outside their departments, our opportunities for assaying reaginic antibody activity were somewhat restricted at that time.