Johns Hopkins Medical Milestones

Medical Milestones

In more than a century of discoveries, Hopkins clinicians and researchers have unlocked the secrets of many diseases and developed novel treatments for them. Below is a sampling of our noteworthy achievements.

• Found that a family of antibiotics that includes penicillin may help prevent nerve damage and death in a wide variety of neurological diseases, including Lou Gehrig’s disease, dementia, stroke and epilepsy.
  
  
• Discovered that emotional shock can trigger sudden, severe but reversible heart failure that mimics a classic heart attack. Patients with stress cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart” syndrome, often are misdiagnosed with a massive heart attack when instead they have suffered from a surge in adrenalin and other stress hormones that temporarily stun the heart.
  
  
• Were the first to do a five-way kidney swap transplant with altruistic donors and demonstrated in a collaborative project that a national matching program for kidney paired donation would ensure the best possible kidney for the greatest number of recipients who have incompatible donors. Another study affirmed the success and efficiency of living KPD procedures. This finding could pave the way for a national matching registry.
  
  
• Identified the gene responsible for Marfan syndrome, a life-threatening connective tissue disorder marked by weakening of the aorta, and identified a candidate life-saving drug for children and adults with the disease.
  
  
• Found that modern implanted heart devices—such as pacemakers and defibrillators—are safe for use in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, previously ruled potentially unsafe and off-limits for more than 2 million Americans who currently have such heart devices in their bodies.
  
  
• Identified three risk factors and developed a simple tool that physicians can use to determine which men are most likely to die from prostate cancer recurrence following surgery, and who would benefit from further treatment.
  
  
• Used innovative “milk” therapy to ease or completely eliminate serious reactions in children allergic to milk. This approach retrains the immune system by giving children increasingly higher doses of milk over time.
  
  
• Found that a modified version of the popular low-carbohydrate, high-fat Atkins diet is nearly as effective at controlling childhood epileptic seizures as the highly restrictive ketogenic diet, without its drawbacks and side effects.
  
  
• Developed “half-matched” bone marrow transplant for leukemia and lymphoma, promising to widen the pool of donors.
  
  
• Built on previous work to find that even older children with a rare congenital disorder associated with epilepsy can end or reduce severe seizures through hemispherectomy, a procedure in which half the brain is removed (2002).
  
  
• Developed the first biologic pacemaker for the heart, paving the way for a genetically engineered alternative to implanted electronic pacemakers (2002).
  
  
• Discovered a novel method of genetically modifying allergy-causing agents such as ragweed, experiments that may lead to faster, safer and more effective vaccines for preventing and treating asthma and hay fever (2001).
  
  
• Helped discover the first gene directly involved in causing Crohn's disease, one of the two major bowel diseases affecting nearly 500,000 Americans (2001).
  
  
• Used stem cell grafts to restore movement to limbs of paralyzed animals, a major advance in efforts to overcome paralysis in humans (2000).
  
  
• Implicated a sexually transmitted virus called HPV in the development of cancers of the head and neck (2000).
  
  
• Developed an inexpensive, safe and effective drug regimen for preventing HIV transmission from an infected mother to her newborn (1999).
  
  
• Isolated and cultivated human embryonic stem cells, the primordial cells which give rise to all body tissues (1998).
  
  
• Discovered the genetic alteration linked to common forms of colon cancer in normal cells, potentially offering a means of predicting as many as 40 percent of new colon cancers before they actually begin (1998).
  
  
• Genetically engineered mice to grow herculean muscles, a finding with implications for treating muscular dystrophy and other muscle-wasting diseases (1997).
  
  
• Helped develop the first effective treatment for sickle cell anemia (1995).
  
  
• Identified a gene responsible for a widespread form of colon cancer (1993) and developed a stool test and blood test to screen for the disease.
  
  
• Identified aquaporin, a protein that controls passage of water into and out of red blood cells and kidney cells, spawning research that now seems likely to influence treatment of brain swelling and certain lung and kidney diseases (1991). This discovery garnered a Nobel Prize in 2003 for the principal scientist.
  
  
• Discovered that Oltipraz, a compound found in cruciferous vegetables (cabbage, brussels sprouts, cauliflower), offers protection from the effects of radiation therapy (1983).
  
  
• Discovered that pennies worth of vitamin A supplements administered to Indonesian children as part of a blindness prevention program were accompanied by a dramatic drop in infant death rates, leading to similar vitamin treatments for thousands of children in developing countries (1983-1986).
  
  
• Developed the first successful treatment to desensitize people against bee stings (1975).
  
  
• Identified the sites where heroin and other opiates act in the brain, a discovery that has important implications for the treatment of drug addicts and for the screening and development of new and potentially nonaddictive pain-killing drugs (1972).
  
  
• Invented the first implantable, rechargeable pacemaker for cardiac disorders (1972).
  
  
• Developed the first clinically useful argon photocoagulator, providing ophthalmologists with a technique for repairing damaged retinal vasculature (1969).
  
  
• Showed that retrolental fibroplasia, which causes blindness in premature infants, was related to high concentrations of oxygen used in babies' incubators (1954). 
  
  
• Immunized chimpanzees with inactivated vaccines. This was essential to the development of the first widely used polio vaccine and a major step toward the prevention of poliomyelitis in human beings (1947-1952).
  
  
• Described the physiology of and pioneered the surgical repair of a common heart defect known as tetralogy of Fallot (1945). This Johns Hopkins “Blue Baby” technique to repair the defect paved the way for modern heart surgery.