Photo courtesy of The Walter
and Eliza Hall Institute
of Medical Research
Donald Metcalf, MD, an Australian researcher who has been called “the father of hematopoietic cytokines,” has died at the age of 85.
Dr Metcalf’s studies of blood production led to his speculation that there must be a biological mechanism—one or more hormones—that control white blood cell production.
These substances, which he termed colony-stimulating factors (CSFs), were the focus of more than 50 years of research.
Over this time, Dr Metcalf led researchers to characterize and purify 4 separate CSFs—granulocyte CSF (G-CSF), granulocyte-macrophage CSF (GM-CSF), macrophage CSF (M-CSF), and multi-CSF (now called interleukin-3).
Dr Metcalf recognized that CSFs had a potential role in clinical medicine, and his team was among the first in the world to discover the genes for CSFs.
Dr Metcalf was a central figure in the international clinical trials of CSFs in the 1980s, assessing whether CSFs could boost immune cell numbers in cancer patients whose immune system was weakened as a side effect of chemotherapy. On the basis of these studies, G-CSF (Neupogen) was approved for clinical use in 1991.
Now, an estimated 20 million people have been treated with CSFs. As well as boosting the immune system in patients who receive chemotherapy or have other immune deficiencies, CSFs are thought to have revolutionized hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.
A man with many achievements
Dr Metcalf was born in 1929 and started school at the age of 3, by which time he was already reading. He entered university at the age of 16, ultimately obtaining bachelor’s and medical degrees from the University of Sydney.
After an internship at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Dr Metcalf joined the staff of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne in 1954. He was supported by Cancer Council Victoria’s Carden Fellowship, an award he held until his retirement in 2014. (Dr Metcalf officially retired in 1996 but continued to do research until 2014.)
Dr Metcalf spent his early years at WEHI studying vaccinia virus. In 1965, he began studying blood cell formation and, by association, leukemia. In 1966, he became deputy director of WEHI and the head of its Cancer Research Unit.
Dr Metcalf took several sabbaticals from WEHI, serving as a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts; the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York; the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Lausanne, Switzerland; the Radiobiological Institute in Rijswijk, The Netherlands; and the University of Cambridge in the UK.
Among Dr Metcalf’s many honors and awards are the Companion of the Order of Australia (1993), the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research (1993), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1994), the Royal Medal of the Royal Society (1995), the Victoria Prize (2000), and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science (2001).
Dr Metcalf is survived by his wife Jo; daughters Kate, Johanna, Penelope, and Mary-Ann; grandchildren James, Martin, Patrick, Elizabeth, Rose, and Robert; and their extended families.
