- Person
- Ruth Nussenzweig
- Lived
- 1928–2018
- Field
- Immunology, malaria
- From
- Austrian-born Brazilian-American
The story
Ruth Nussenzweig was born in Vienna in 1928 to Jewish parents who were both doctors. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 her father was imprisoned; released through the help of a Nazi official he had once assisted, the family fled to Belgium and then to Brazil. She trained in medicine in São Paulo, and after Brazil’s 1964 military coup she and her husband and research partner, Victor Nussenzweig, made their careers at New York University.
Malaria is spread by mosquitoes that inject a form of the parasite called a sporozoite. Until the late 1960s there was little or no reason to believe that people could ever be fully protected against the disease by a vaccine. In 1967 Ruth Nussenzweig and her colleagues reported in Nature that mice immunised with sporozoites weakened by X-rays were protected against a rodent malaria parasite. Inspired by that result, by 1974 two research groups had shown that humans could be protected by bites from mosquitoes carrying irradiated sporozoites of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest human malaria parasite.
The Nussenzweigs then looked for what the immune system was recognising. In 1980 they reported that an antibody against the main surface protein of the sporozoite, which they named the circumsporozoite protein (CSP), protected mice. Their team was one of two that published the gene for CSP in 1984, and one of two that showed in the late 1980s that a vaccine based entirely on CSP could protect people.
RTS,S, the first malaria vaccine recommended by the World Health Organization, in 2021, is built on CSP fused to a hepatitis B protein. WHO recommended a second vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, in 2023, and African countries are now adding malaria vaccines to childhood immunisation. Malaria kills nearly half a million children in Africa each year. The malaria researcher Stephen Hoffman wrote after her death in 2018 that the vast majority of all humans ever protected against malaria by a vaccine had been protected by vaccines stemming from the Nussenzweigs’ reports of 1967 and 1980.
Why it matters
Malaria vaccines built on Ruth Nussenzweig’s discoveries are now being given to young children across Africa, where malaria kills nearly half a million children every year.
About Ruth Nussenzweig
Vienna-born refugee scientist who proved in 1967 that a vaccine could protect against malaria and helped find the parasite protein behind today’s malaria vaccines for African children.
Sources
- In Memoriam: Ruth S. Nussenzweig, MD, PhD American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
- The malaria vaccine pioneer Pesquisa FAPESP
- WHO recommends R21/Matrix-M vaccine for malaria prevention World Health Organization
- RTS,S Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.