First Red Cross Histocompatibility Workshop

Abstract

The First Red Cross International Histocompatibility Workshop (IHW) will be held on October 17–23, 1990 in Beijing, China. It was started as an opportunity for the many Red Cross laboratories around the world to share and exchange information with each other. The majority of the world’s alloantibodies have been procured by the Red Cross System. It is important to collaborate on this great wealth of data. The participating Red Cross laboratories are from seven countries: Australia, Canada, China, Finland, Japan, Hungary and the United States. Its goals are similar to those of the International Histocompatibility Workshops which were originally organized over twenty five years ago in 1964 by Bernard Amos as a small collaboration with workers gathered in a single laboratory to share information on methods and techniques. The major principle of the IHWs is that the joint collaboration of all the laboratories together produce what no single laboratory can do on its own. Thus, the exchange of cells and sera make available to all an international typed cell panel, defined reagents and an enormous, valuable body of data. The first three IHWs were devoted to the comparison of HLA typing techniques until after the 1967 Workshop when a standard microlymphocytotoxicity method was adopted (1). All subsequent workshops have used the same technique.