Roy T. Sawyer

Bedeutung für die Hirudotherapie

Roy T. Sawyer is a zoologist (Wikidata Q21341594) whose published work spans the biochemistry and the history of medicinal leeches; his 2000 paper gives his address as the Medical Leech Museum, Bryngelen House, Hendy, Wales. In 1992, with colleagues writing in the Journal of Enzyme Inhibition, he reported the isolation and purification of a potent elastase inhibitor, named GELIN, from the jawed leech Hirudinaria manillensis, a species closely related to Hirudo medicinalis. GELIN was purified to homogeneity by ion-exchange chromatography and reverse-phase HPLC; its isoelectric point was 4.55, against 6.45 for eglin from Hirudo, and amino-terminal analysis of the first 29 residues showed no homology with eglin or other serine-protease inhibitors, which the authors took to indicate an independent evolutionary origin of the two inhibitors (PMID 1284966). Sawyer also contributed to the historical record of hirudotherapy. In a 2000 article in the British Journal of Plastic Surgery he documented how Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach (1792–1847) used leeches regularly and successfully in sophisticated plastic surgery in Berlin during the 1820s and 1830s, well before anaesthesia, antisepsis and antibiotics, and observed that nearly another 150 years passed before the use of leeches in this context was revived (PMID 10738334). Statements about his earlier monographs and about the founding of a commercial leech supplier remain subject to ASH's ongoing source verification and are not asserted here.