Hilary Koprowski, 96

Virologist Hilary Koprowski died on 11 April 2013 at the age of 96. His main accomplishments are nicely summarized in the New York Times, but for a more comprehensive overview of his life, I highly recommend his biography Listen to the Music by Roger Vaughan. I did not have many opportunities to interact with Dr. Koprowski, but I did follow his work on poliovirus vaccines and I have a few reminiscences. In the 1930s Max Theiler had found that propagating yellow fever virus in an unnatural host – the chick embryo – dramatically reduced its capacity to cause disease in humans. Theiler’s work (which garnered him a Nobel Prize) lead to the production of the infectious, attenuated yellow fever vaccine which helped to vastly reduce the global incidence of yellow fever. Koprowski was inspired by Theiler’s work and decided to take a similar approach to developing a poliovirus vaccine – his first efforts involved passage of a type 2 strain of poliovirus in mice and then in cotton rats. After passage in  rodents, the virus did not cause paralysis in monkeys. Koprowski tested the candidate vaccine strain in humans, and ultimately produced two other attenuated poliovirus strains. By the 1960s these attenuated poliovirus vaccine candidates had been tested in millions of humans. However, they were never licensed for use in the US. While Koprowski was carrying out his work, Albert Sabin was also developed attenuated vaccine strains of poliovirus. Both Sab...
Source: virology blog - Category: Virology Authors: Tags: Basic virology Information AIDS attenuated chat Hilary Koprowski HIV polio vaccine poliovirus viral Source Type: blogs