- Person
- Judith Graham Pool
- Lived
- 1919–1975
- Field
- Physiology, hematology
- From
- American
The story
People with hemophilia A lack enough of a blood protein called factor VIII, or antihemophilic factor, and without it even small injuries can bleed for days. Bleeding into joints causes pain and lasting damage. Until the mid-1960s the only way to replace the protein was to give whole blood or plasma, where factor VIII is scarce, so patients needed large volumes of fluid, usually in hospital, and serious bleeds and surgery were hard to control.
Judith Graham Pool, born in Queens in 1919 to a Jewish family, trained as a physicist and physiologist at the University of Chicago and joined Stanford’s School of Medicine in 1953 on a grant for hemophilia research. She spent a decade studying blood coagulation. Her key observation was that when frozen plasma is thawed slowly at a temperature just above freezing, a small cold-insoluble precipitate forms, and that precipitate holds much of the plasma’s factor VIII.
She reported the discovery with two colleagues in the journal Nature in July 1964. In December 1965 she and A. E. Shannon showed in the New England Journal of Medicine how to make the concentrate in a closed-bag system, using the sterile plastic bags blood banks already used. That meant any blood bank could make cryoprecipitate without special equipment, freeze it and store it for up to a year.
The effect on patients was dramatic. Doctors could now give enough factor VIII in a small volume to stop a bleed quickly and to make operations safe, and treatment could move out of the hospital: the Jewish Women’s Archive notes that it allowed hemophiliacs to be treated with more ease than ever before, at home or in any medical facility. Cryoprecipitate rapidly became the preferred treatment for acute bleeding in hemophilia A.
Purified and genetically engineered factor concentrates have since become the standard hemophilia treatment where they are available, but hospital blood banks around the world still stock cryoprecipitate, made essentially the way Pool described. It is used today mainly to replace fibrinogen in patients with massive bleeding, and it remains a treatment for bleeding disorders where concentrates cannot be had. The National Hemophilia Foundation named its research fellowships for her.
Why it matters
Cryoprecipitate brought fast, practical treatment to people with hemophilia and is still stocked by blood banks worldwide to control severe bleeding.
About Judith Graham Pool
Stanford physiologist who discovered cryoprecipitate, a simple frozen plasma concentrate of clotting factor VIII that let people with hemophilia stop bleeding quickly, safely and even at home.
Sources
- Judith Graham Pool Jewish Women’s Archive
- High-potency antihaemophilic factor concentrate prepared from cryoglobulin precipitate (Nature, 1964) PubMed
- 1964: Judith Pool discovers a simple way to make cryoprecipitates Hemophilia Alliance
- Cryoprecipitate Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.