Baruch Blumberg's blood test made transfusions safer

Person: Baruch Blumberg
Lived: 1925–2011
Field: Medicine
From: American

The story

Before the 1970s, a blood transfusion could save a life and then quietly endanger it. Hepatitis B spreads through blood, and donors who carried the virus without any symptoms could pass it to the patients who received their blood. At the time, about one in ten hospitalised hepatitis B patients in industrialised countries went on to carry the virus long term, and more than 100 million people worldwide were estimated to be chronic carriers.

Baruch Blumberg came to the problem from an unexpected direction. As a geneticist he was studying inherited variations in blood proteins, and in the mid-1960s he found that the blood serum of a haemophilia patient who had received many transfusions reacted with an unusual protein in a sample from an Aboriginal Australian. The protein became known as the Australia antigen. Between 1966 and 1968 Blumberg and his colleagues showed that it appeared in connection with the form of hepatitis then called serum hepatitis, now hepatitis B, and that it was part of the virus itself.

The team moved quickly to turn the discovery into a practical tool. Working with the microbiologist Irving Millman at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, later part of Fox Chase Cancer Center, Blumberg developed a blood test that could detect the virus. Blood banks began using it to screen donations in 1971, and according to the Hepatitis B Foundation the risk of hepatitis B infection from a transfusion fell by 25 percent.

Screening became more effective when the group introduced a more sensitive radioimmunoassay, and better tests from other laboratories followed. Blumberg later recalled that within a few years hepatitis B after transfusion had been essentially eliminated in the United States and many other countries. The remaining cases pointed to another blood-borne virus, eventually identified as hepatitis C, and testing for it brought a second sharp drop.

In 1976 Blumberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and the Nobel committee noted that his discoveries made possible tests to stop the disease spreading through transfusions. In 1993 he and Millman were elected together to the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the test and the vaccine. The World Health Organization now recommends that all blood donations be tested for hepatitis B.

Why it matters

Screening donated blood for hepatitis B protected millions of surgical patients, accident victims and people with blood disorders who depend on transfusions.

About Baruch Blumberg

Physician and geneticist who discovered the hepatitis B virus, co-invented its blood test and vaccine, and shared the 1976 Nobel Prize, work credited with preventing millions of liver cancers.

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Baruch Blumberg

1925–2011 · Medicine

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