Baruch Blumberg licensed his vaccine for the world

Person: Baruch Blumberg
Lived: 1925–2011
Field: Medicine
From: American

The story

After identifying the hepatitis B virus, Blumberg and his colleague Irving Millman saw a chance to prevent the disease. Many chronic carriers produce huge numbers of small, harmless particles made of the virus's outer surface protein. In 1969 Blumberg and Millman devised a new kind of vaccine: harvest those surface particles from carriers' blood, purify them, and use them to train the immune system. No vaccine had ever been made this way before.

Fox Chase Cancer Center patented the invention, but turning it into a product proved difficult. Vaccines were not an attractive business, since they are given only a few times, and in the early 1970s many researchers still doubted that the virus had been identified at all. The National Institutes of Health, which had funded much of the work, kept the domestic patent rights and gave the cancer centre the foreign rights. By the mid-1970s Blumberg and Millman judged the evidence strong enough to look for a manufacturer, and in 1976 the centre signed an agreement with Merck to produce the vaccine by their method.

Blumberg's aim was to get the vaccine into people's arms, not to guard it. When he visited China in 1977, soon after his Nobel Prize, he gave Chinese scientists a copy of the vaccine patent and information on producing it, and put them in contact with Merck. The resulting exchange of technical information eventually allowed China to make the vaccine itself. In Taiwan he suggested that blood banks keep the plasma of carriers, which was later sold to make vaccine.

Field trials led by Wolf Szmuness and colleagues at the New York Blood Bank showed more than 90 percent protection. Merck's plasma-derived vaccine, Heptavax, became the first commercial hepatitis B vaccine, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1981.

Genetically engineered vaccines made without blood products followed from 1986, and they rest on the same principle Blumberg and Millman established: the virus's surface protein can teach the body to defend itself. The recombinant hepatitis B vaccine became the first widely used vaccine made by that method, and by 2000 more than a billion doses had been given.

Why it matters

By pushing for the vaccine to be licensed and manufactured, Blumberg helped turn a laboratory idea into a vaccine now given routinely to babies around the world.

About Baruch Blumberg

Physician and geneticist who discovered the hepatitis B virus, co-invented its blood test and vaccine, and shared the 1976 Nobel Prize, work credited with preventing millions of liver cancers.

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Baruch Blumberg

1925–2011 · Medicine

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