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Anti-glomerular basement membrane (GBM) disease (Goodpasture’s syndrome) 1

Part 1 of 2
Published on May 28, 2026   10 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Kidney in Health and Disease

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Hello. My name is Charles Pusey and I'm Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Imperial College London, based at the Hammersmith Hospital. Today, I would like to talk to you about anti-glomerular basement membrane disease, previously known as Goodpasture's syndrome.
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Ernest Goodpasture was an American pathologist, who described the case of a young man with glomerulonephritis and lung haemorrhage during the influenza pandemic of 1919. At the time, he attributed those clinical features to the influenza. It was not until nearly 40 years later that the term Goodpasture's syndrome was first used to describe a series of patients with similar clinical features from Australia. Of course, we do not know whether they really had anti-GBM disease because it was not until the 1960s, that immunofluorescence techniques were developed which allowed us to identify anti-GBM antibodies in kidney tissue. Shortly after that, there were the classic transfer experiments of Lerner, Glassock, and Dixon, in which antibodies eluted from the kidneys of patients were used to transfer glomerulonephritis to non-human primates. Shortly after that, anti-GBM antibodies in the circulation were first detected in patients. In 1973, Wilson and Dixon gave the first comprehensive description of a series of patients with anti-GBM disease. In the mid 1970s, Lockwood and colleagues from the Hammersmith hospital first described the successful use of plasma exchange to remove anti-GBM antibodies as part of the therapeutic approach.

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Anti-glomerular basement membrane (GBM) disease (Goodpasture’s syndrome) 1

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