Content area
Abstract
Immune privilege was first formally proposed by Peter Medawar, who was awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery. Medawar's collaborator and first author on that paper was Rupert Billingham, who became Streilein's mentor. [Henry Kaplan] worked with Streilein and Billingham at UT. "Among his notable contributions was the concept of anterior chamber-associated immune deviation (ACAID)" says Kaplan, who published the first scientific description of this type of immune tolerance with Streilein in the Journal of Immunology in 1977. Streilein and Jerry Niederkorn gave it the designation ACAID in the Journal of Experimental Medicine in 1981. This paper showed unequivocally that a "deviant" immune response occurred in the anterior chamber of the eye that gave immune privilege to foreign antigens and grafts. Niederkorn is now chairman of the UT Southwestern immunology programme. "Streilein put all the observations together into a cohesive explanation as to how immune privilege works. He gave us a clear indication of the many regulatory processes that go on in the eye", he says.