Complementology’s foundation: The 100-year anniversary of the Nobel Prize to Jules Bordet

Abstract

ABSTRACT The discovery of the complement system was associated with the creation of medical serodiagnosis in the early 20th century. Its biotechnological applications, usable even a century after its development by Jules Bordet, preceded for decades the proof of its biochemical rather than biophysical nature. Complement science has begun to emerge, thanks to the labs of Michael Heidelberger and his student Manfred Martin Mayer. Complementology had known difficult moments like the suicide of Louis Pillemer by swallowing the reagents of his laboratory following the criticisms of his discovery by Robert A. Nelson, Jr., in March 1957, at the Walter Reed Army Institute. This alternative complement pathway continues to revolutionize medicine by its implications as the principal component of immunosurveillance and as an amplification loop for plasma proteolytic cascades. Moreover, the drug designed in pathologies related to this pathway, eculizumab, was the most expensive drug in the world at the beginning of its marketing. Complementology promises great hopes in inflammatory and degenerative diseases, regenerative medicine, transplantation, and vector nanotechnology and as a diagnostic tool primarily in transplantation and inflammatory imaging. The moral and historical responsibility requires to make known this legacy to the new generation of doctors and scientists and also the technicians of the clinical laboratory of complementology throughout the world.