The discovery of antibiotics and transfer factor

Several very important discoveries regarding immune system functioning and health have been made in the past 100 years. In general, the emphasis has rested on finding substances that can directly attack invaders, as is the case with antibiotics and many antiviral drugs. Less emphasis has been placed on ways to help the individual's own immune system deal with foreign threats. Let's begin by looking at two such important discoveries – antibiotics and transfer factors – and discuss how these discoveries have affected the way that we deal with disease, and the roles they will likely play in the future of medicine.

In 1928, in a laboratory in London , Alexander Fleming observed that a common species of mold known as Penicillium was capable of killing bacteria in Petri dishes. By all accounts, Dr. Fleming didn't intend to discover an antibiotic. He returned to his lab after some time away and found that the bacteria he was culturing didn't grow within a narrow zone around the fringes of a pesky mold that contaminated his samples. He probably wasn't the first to observe this phenomenon, but he was the first to pursue an understanding of just how the mold prevented bacterial growth. Dr. Fleming identified the component of the mold with antibacterial properties and labeled it, “penicillin”. It would be another 15 years – during the 1940s -- before researchers realized the full potential of penicillin and figured out how to turn Dr. Fleming's discovery into a mass producible treatment for disease. And so began an era in which rates of death due to minor infections and communicable bacteria plummeted.

In 1949, at a time when penicillin and the sulfa drugs, antibiotics developed in Germany , were gaining reputations as life savers, a tuberculosis researcher named Dr. H Sherwood Lawrence made another important discovery in disease management. He extracted intracellular fluid from white blood cells in patients who had been exposed to tuberculosis (TB). He then injected the contents of these cells into non-exposed patients. In doing so, he protected them from contracting TB. He called the mystery components “transfer factor”, as they somehow transferred immunity from one patient to the next.

At the time that transfer factors were discovered our understanding of disease states was quite limited and the ability to extract transfer factors for use in treatment beyond single cases was not available. The miraculous effects of antibiotics were becoming widely known at the time and they took center stage. Fifty years later, with improvements in our understanding of disease states and vast improvements in technology, transfer factors have now emerged on the scene as potentially powerful weapons against disease – including diseases resistant to, or untouchable by, antibiotics.
Immunologists suspect that transfer factors are small chains of amino acids and bits of RNA that contain the instructions that the immune system uses to recognize and fight foreign invaders and cancer cells. As new immune cells are born, they pick up transfer factors and read them like notes left by immune cells before them. Each time a person becomes ill and their immune system learns how to battle a pathogen, transfer factors are created and are used the next time around to make the battle against the pathogen more efficient.