Koehler, Nobel Winner In Medicine, Dies At 48

Georges Koehler, who shared the 1984 Nobel Prize for medicine, has died at age 48.

He died Wednesday of a lung infection, Freiburg University said.

Koehler was director of the Max Planck Institute for Immune Biology at Freiburg, where he studied before he began working in the 1970s with Cesar Milstein at Cambridge in Britain on the fusion of white blood cells.

They developed a method of producing large quantities of monoclonal antibodies, which have many uses in diagnosis and treatment of illnesses.