Georges Mathé

Georges Mathé (9 July 1922 – 15 October 2010) was a French oncologist and immunologist. In November 1958, he performed the first successful allogeneic bone marrow transplant ever performed on unrelated human beings.

Biography Georges Mathé was born in 1922 in the village of Sermages, France, from a rural family. Selected by his village school master, he was sent to study in a boarding school in Moulins, Allier.

Education and early career During World War II, he participated in the French Resistance, and studied to become a medical doctor in Paris. He graduated in 1950–51 with honors.

Oncology and bone marrow transplants He engaged in medical research in the early fifties, and took an internship in immunology and oncology in the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center, New York.

He specialised in hematology when working with Pr. Paul Chevallier and Pr. Jean Bernard, and devoting himself to child leukemia.

In November 1958, Mathé performed the first bone marrow graft between unrelated donors and hosts ever made in the world, in order to save four Yugoslav nuclear researchers who had been accidentally irradiated. That event made him aware of the possibility and necessity of developing active and adoptive immunotherapy and applying it to the treatment of cancers.

He also participated with René Kuss and Marcel Legrain in 1960 and 61 to the first successful kidney grafts between non related donors and hosts.

By 1963 he "shook the medical world" when he announced he had cured a patient of leukemia by means of a bone marrow transplant. He later showed that stem cells could not only heal radiation damage, but also fight cancer. He also demonstrated the positive role of BCG combined with irradiated tumoral cells.

From 1990 to 2008, Mathé worked as a consultant at the Paris Swiss Hospital, at the Rome European Hospital, at the Sofia Oncological Hospital, at the Belgrade Civil Hospital and at the Hôpital Paul-Brousse.

In the early 1990s, conscious of the immunological nature of HIV/AIDS, Mathé applied immunotherapy to a dozen patients. He also successfully treated them with a cocktail of 5 alternating molecules, at a time when HIV/AIDS was considered ineluctably lethal and before the introduction of tritherapy.

All his life, he cooperated with researchers all around the world, particularly the US, Japan and, shortly before his death, China. He also chaired l’Entraide Médicale Internationale, which is devoted to improving African medicine.

He published more than a thousand articles and books, and received many international awards (Cameron Price, Gold Medal of the Ciba Foundation, Johan-Georg-Zimmermann Award, Health Memorial awards, Prix Bred du Cancer, International Award of chemotherapy, Gotlieb Memorial Award, Prix Leopold Griffuel du Cancer, Prix Medawar and Grande Médaille of the French Académie Nationale de Médecine).

Dr. Brian Bolwell, chief of hematology at the Cleveland Clinic noted that Dr. Mathé had proved an important principle: "You can cure an incurable leukemia patient.", and had developed both a technique and an important term, "adoptive immunotherapy," to describe how a person's own immune system can be used to combat cancer and other diseases.