Robin Coombs

Robert Royston Amos ("Robin") Coombs, (January 9 1921 – February 25 2006), was a British physician and immunologist, co-discoverer of the Coombs test (1945) used for detecting antibodies in various clinical scenarios, such as Rh disease and blood transfusion.

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Biography

He was born in London and studied veterinary medicine at Edinburgh University. In 1943 he went up to King's College, Cambridge where he commenced work on a doctorate, which he gained in 1947. Before finishing his doctorate, he developed and published methods to detect antibodies with Dr Arthur Mourant and Dr Rob Race in 1945^[1]. This, his first discovery is the test now referred to as the Coombs test, which according to the legend he first devised while travelling on the train^[2].

Coombs became a professor and researcher at the Department of Pathology of University of Cambridge, becoming a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, and a founder of its Division of Immunology. He continued to work at Cambridge University until 1988^[2].

He received honorary doctoral degrees by the University of Guelph, Canada, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom (1965), a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists and a Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

He was married to Anne Blomfield, his first graduate student. They had a son and a daughter^[2].

Works

The Coombs test, which he developed and published together with Dr Arthur Mourant and Dr Rob Race in 1945, has formed the base of a large number of laboratory investigations in the fields of hematology and immunology^[1][2][3].

Together with Professor Philip George Howthern Gell, he developed a classification of immune mechanisms of tissue injury, now known as the "Gell-Coombs classification", comprising four types of reactions^[4].

Together with W.E. Parish and A.F. Wells he put forward an explanation of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) as an anaphylactic reaction to dairy proteins^[5]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Coombs RRA, Mourant AE, Race RR. Detection of weak and "incomplete" Rh agglutinins: a new test. Lancet 1945;246:15-6. DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(45)90806-3.
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Pincock S. Robert Royston Amos (Robin) Coombs. Lancet 2006;367:1234. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(06)68528-0.
3. ^ Coombs RR. Historical note: past, present and future of the antiglobulin test. Vox Sang 1998;74:67-73. PMID 9501403.
4. ^ Gell PGH, Coombs RRA. Clinical Aspects of Immunology. London: Blackwell, 1963.
5. ^ Coombs RRA, Parish WE, Walls AF. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Could a healthy infant succumb to inhalation-anaphylaxis during sleep leading to cot death?. Cambridge Publications Ltd, 2000. ISBN 0-9540081-0-3.