For his work on the Hib vaccine, Dr. In addition to his work on the Hib vaccine, Dr. Robbins also had a significant role in developing a conjugated typhoid fever vaccine, currently being used in Pakistan.
His efforts provided an approach that is now also used in protecting against meningococcus and pneumococcus, as well as ongoing efforts related to other infectious agents. Robbins worked at the National Institutes of Health for four decades before retiring at the age of Read more in his obituary published by The New York Times ». Louis Z. Cooper, a pioneer in the field of rubella research and vaccination and an advocate for child health, passed away on Oct.
A staunch advocate for the rights of children affected by congenital rubella syndrome CRS , and their families, Dr. Cooper dedicated his medical career to ensuring that every child received the support services necessary to cope with the challenges of CRS, including founding the Rubella Project to support these needs.
Cooper served as president of the American Academy of Pediatrics in He was also a retired Air Force captain. Donald A. Henderson, known as D. Beginning in , Dr. The last known case occurred in , and the disease was declared eradicated in Prior to taking this position at the WHO, Dr. The latter — also known as ring vaccination — was developed by colleague Dr. After leaving the WHO, Dr. In , Henderson became the U. Until his death, Dr. Henderson remained an important source of expert guidance related to control of infectious diseases and vaccine policy, particularly as it related to bioterrorism preparedness.
You can find out more about Dr. Henderson on his project profile page. In he earned his doctoral degree in epidemiology from the University of Michigan. It was during his doctoral training that Dr. Through decades of hard work, Dr. Between and , bacterial vaccine development proliferated, including the Bacillis-Calmette-Guerin BCG vaccination, which is still in use today.
In , Alexander Glenny perfected a method to inactivate tetanus toxin with formaldehyde. The same method was used to develop a vaccine against diphtheria in Pertussis vaccine development took considerably longer, with a whole cell vaccine first licensed for use in the US in Viral tissue culture methods developed from , and led to the advent of the Salk inactivated polio vaccine and the Sabin live attenuated oral polio vaccine. Mass polio immunisation has now eradicated the disease from many regions around the world.
Progess of polio elimination and Image:CDC. Attenuated strains of measles, mumps and rubella were developed for inclusion in vaccines. While visiting the Ottoman Empire, she leant about Turkish customs and witnessed the practice of inoculation against smallpox. Lady Mary was eager to spare her children the suffering of smallpox, so in she had her son Edward inoculated.
On her return to London, she promoted the procedure, despite resistance from the medical establishment. Image via Britannica. Her isolation of a strain of diphtheria in was used to develop the first diphtheria anti-toxin and later a diphtheria vaccine. She was also the first woman to be elected chair of the laboratory section of the American Public Health Association.
Many years later, diphtheria is now completely preventable, and children around the world are protected from it through the combined diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis DTP vaccines.
Photo via NIH. Working with a limited budget, Eldering and Kendrick researched pertussis whooping cough , tested their vaccine first on themselves, and then ran a successful clinical trial. This resulted in the first vaccine against the disease being introduced in America in the s. Following the development of the pertussis vaccine, they combined it with two other vaccines diphtheria and tetanus into a single shot — DTP vaccine.
Among her many achievements, Pittman is known for her research into the Haemophilus influenzae bacterium. Type b Hib is the most harmful, causing meningitis and other serious infections. Uruguay — a country with universal health care, a robust epidemiological surveillance system and a relatively small population, of 3. But Moratorio understood the risk. Moratorio saw that the way to avoid spiralling outbreaks was to test widely and to isolate positive cases. He and his long-time collaborator, virologist Pilar Moreno, knew that the resulting shortage would make it impossible for Uruguay to procure tests and reagents.
The government shut down businesses and schools, announced restrictions on flights and border crossings and asked people to isolate themselves. Within a few weeks, the researchers had transformed their test into a simple and efficient kit, with just three tubes, and taking up only one well in a PCR machine. By the end of May, Uruguay was performing more than tests per day, and about half of the kits were produced domestically. Life in Uruguay has mostly gone back to normal.
Schools and restaurants have reopened, and many people are back at work. Even Moratorio and his team have slowly returned to their original research. But he remains alert. In August, her team reported a big victory that could point the way towards defeating this disease — which afflicts up to million people per year — and possibly others carried by mosquitoes, too. Epidemiologists hailed the result as staggering — and a long-sought win against a virus that has plagued many countries, especially lower-income nations in Asia, Africa and South America.
The project was the first randomized controlled trial — the gold standard in clinical research — of a completely new approach to controlling dengue. The technique breeds Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which transmit the dengue, Zika and chikungunya viruses, such that they carry a bacterium called Wolbachia. The bacterium subdues the viruses and prevents the mosquitoes from passing them on to humans.
Small trials in Australia and Vietnam had produced tantalizing results. But Yogyakarta, a dense city of nearly , people with high rates of dengue transmission, provided a much bigger stage for a trial. More often than not, community members were keen to be in the treatment areas. Work on the Yogyakarta trial started in , but the team faced some problems getting government agreement.
Utarini, an experienced public-health researcher who had worked on tuberculosis and malaria, was recruited in to help. She negotiated with several government ministries, winning regulatory approval soon after.
Wolbachia mosquitoes are now being released across Yogyakarta and, for the first time, dengue researchers are contemplating the idea that they could eliminate the virus from a city — or perhaps even a country. In difficult times, she has turned to her other passions — piano playing and cycling.
When it comes to dengue, she is optimistic. Kathrin Jansen knew she was taking a big risk. No firm had managed to win approval to use one in humans before.
But with the death count mounting around the globe in March, Jansen went all in on the new vaccine platform. Her team managed that feat in just days, from the beginning of testing in April to the completion of phase III clinical trials in November.
Thousands of scientists across the world, from academia and industry, have been involved in developing and trialling dozens of preventive vaccines to combat the new coronavirus. And several companies have reported developing effective vaccines, a list that will grow as more trials are completed.
Managing a person operation — often through Zoom calls from her New York City apartment — Jansen has spent the past year troubleshooting clinical issues with the COVID vaccine trials, sorting out manufacturing logistics around cold-storage requirements and, most recently, navigating regulatory affairs on the next steps for vaccine roll-out. The work paid off. Jansen has a track record of taking on nasty pathogens under challenging circumstances.
While at Merck, she initiated a project to tackle human papillomavirus HPV — a sexually transmitted infection that causes cervical cancer — even as many colleagues told her the research was a waste of time and money. Jansen worked on anthrax and smallpox vaccines at a now-defunct company called VaxGen, before joining Wyeth, which later became Pfizer after the firms merged.
Gardasil ranks as number two. Jansen got teary eyed. She enjoyed a glass of champagne with her husband. Then it was back to work doing what she has done for the past 30 years: trying to immunize the world against another deadly pathogen. That was when virologist Zhang Yongzhen, after days of hesitation, agreed to post online the genome of the virus that was causing pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan, China.
His sharing showed the world that this was a new coronavirus, and similar to the one that caused the deadly outbreak of SARS severe acute respiratory syndrome. But releasing the sequence was not a straightforward matter.
On the same day, the Chinese government circulated an order forbidding local authorities and labs from publishing information about the virus. After 40 hours of work, at 2 a. He then waited for the NCBI to process the upload and send it back for him to review. Over the next few days, he submitted a paper to Nature about the genome and visited Wuhan, where he got first-hand accounts from physicians about the effects of the virus.
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