This thesis embodies much of my work done over the past 25 years. The impetus
for these studies was the need to provide the best tissue typing available for organ
transplantation and to overcome the problems of defining HLA antigens in
different ethnic groups. These goals were achieved by extensive international
collaboration and participation in the International Histocompatibility Workshops.
The discovery that the HLA antigens are associated with many diseases led to an
epidemic of investigations in which over 500 diseases have been studied. In
retrospect, it is not surprising that auto-immune diseases such as diabetes and
rheumatoid arthritis showed such marked associations with HLA antigens. The
studies in Part II of this thesis were aimed at finding out if the HLA associations
reported in Caucasian populations were also present in the Black and Indian
populations.
These research interests led to my being invited by the National Science Council
of the Republic of China in Taiwan to be a Visiting Professor at the National
Taiwan University in Taipei for the 1989 academic year. I investigated the
association between HLA and naso-pharyngeal carcinoma in Chinese during that
year.
I wish to express my appreciation to Dr Peter Brain who inspired the early
investigations and continued to encourage and support my research. I am grateful
to all my co-authors and the many colleagues, clinicians and laboratory staff who
have contributed to the various research programmes.
Studies of the relationship of the HLA system to cancer, diabetes, arthritis and
other diseases have been supported in part by grants from the National Cancer
Association and the Medical Research Council of South Africa. / Thesis (D.Sc.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/8151 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Creators | Hammond., Michael Graham. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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