After listening to a talk by biologist David Baltimore and further stimulation from his virologist colleague, Robert Ting, concerning the work of the late Howard Martin Temin, Gallo became interested in the study of retroviruses, and made their study the primary activity of his lab. In 1976, Doris Morgan, a first year post-doctoral fellow in Gallo's lab, was asked by Gallo to examine culture fluid of activated lymphocytes for the possible production of growth factors. Soon she was successful in growing T lymphocytes. Gallo, Morgan and Frank Ruscetti, another researcher in Gallo's lab, coauthored a paper in Science describing their method. The Gallo group identified this as T-cell growth factor (TCGF). The name was changed in 1978 to IL-2 (interleukin-2) by the Second International Lymphokine Conference (which was held in Interlaken, Switzerland). Although earlier reports had described soluble molecules with biologic effects, the effects and biochemistry of the factors were not well characterized. One such example was the report by Julius Gordon in 1965, which described blastogenic transformation of lymphocytes in extracellular media. However, cell growth was not demonstrated and the affected cell type was not identified, making the identity of the factor(s) involved unclear and its natural function unknown.
The discovery of IL-2 allowed T cells, previously thought to be dead end cells, to be grown significantly in culture for the first time, opening research into many aspects of T cell immunology. Gallo's lab later purified and biochemically characterized IL-2. This breakthrough also allowed researchers to grow T-cells and study the viruses that affect them, such as human T-cell leukemia virus, or HTLV, the first retrovirus identified in humans, which Bernard Poiesz, another post-doctoral fellow in Gallo's lab played a key role in its isolation. HTLV's role in leukemia was clarified when Kiyoshi Takatsuki and other Japanese researchers, puzzling over an outbreak of a rare form of leukemia, later independently found the same retrovirus, and both groups showed HTLV to be the cause. At the same time, a similar HTLV-associated leukemia was identified by the Gallo group in the Caribbean. In 1982, Gallo received the Lasker Award: "For his pioneering studies that led to the discovery of the first human RNA tumor virusand its association with certain leukemias and lymphomas."
Please give me a short bulleted list of the key discoveries from Gallo’s lab.
Successfully growing T lymphocytes in culture for the first time
Interleukin-2 (IL-2)
Human T-cell leukemia virus
The first human retrovirus