NMAH | Polio: History of Vaccines

Virus, Vaccines, Verification
World War II accelerated vaccine development. Fear of a repetition of the 1918–19 world epidemic of influenza focused urgent attention on all viral diseases, while commercial production of antibiotics taught researchers to grow viruses with less microbe contamination. Also, investigators paid closer attention to vaccine safety and effectiveness through clinical studies before release of a vaccine to the public, especially after the yellow fever vaccine apparently caused hepatitis B in many U.S. soldiers in 1942.

Room with rows of army soldiers with masks over their mouths and noses

The U.S. Army hospital in Royat, France, during the World War I influenza epidemic Courtesy of National Library of Medicine

Early Research
Polio vaccine is made from the actual virus. For both research and production, vaccine makers needed to grow large quantities of virus. Influenza virus had been grown in chicken eggs, but this method did not polio. So researchers sought other materials in which to grow poliovirus.

In 1936, Albert Sabin and Peter Olitsky at the Rockefeller Institute demonstrated that poliovirus could grow in human embryonic brain tissue, but they feared that this method might risk central nervous system damage in those who received the vaccine. The advantage of embryonic tissue, however, was that it grew quickly.

Left Photo: Page from a notebook with hand written notes

Right Photo: Three men receiving the Nobel Prize

Left: Copy of page from Thomas Wellerís notebook, March 30, 1948, describing the experiment for which he, John Enders, and Frederick Robbins won the Nobel Prize in 1954 Courtesy of Watson Publishing International
Right: Thomas Weller, Frederick Robbins, and John Enders receiving the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, for “the cultivation of the poliomyelitis viruses in tissue culture,” 1954

A Nobel Prize
In March 1948, John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins used human embryonic skin and muscle tissue, grown in a nutrient mix with antibiotics, to prove poliovirus could infect tissue other than nerve cells. Their confirmation meant that researchers could now grow enough poliovirus to create large quantities of vaccine.

The three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954, the year polio vaccine had its first large clinical trial. Neither Jonas Salk nor Albert Sabin received a Nobel Prize for their work in creating vaccines.

Photo of a wooden roller and a wooden flask holder with five flasks

From John Enders’s lab, 1948: flasks in which poliovirus grew in monkey kidney tissue, and the wooden roller used to test tubes containing the growing virus slowly and continuously.