History
As a fellow at Children's Hospital Boston, Dr. Thomas C. Peebles worked with Dr. John Franklin Enders, known as "The Father of Modern vaccines", who earned the Nobel Prize in 1954 for his research on cultivating the polio virus that led to the development of a vaccination for the disease. Switching to study measles, Peebles was sent to a school where an outbreak of the disease was under way and was able to isolate the virus from some of the blood samples and throat swabs he had taken from students. Even after Enders had taken him off the study team, Peebles was able to cultivate the virus and show that the disease could be passed on to monkeys inoculated with the material he had collected. Enders was able to use the cultivated virus to develop a measles vaccine in 1963 based on the material isolated by Peebles. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, nearly twice as many children died from measles as from polio. The vaccine Enders developed was based on the Edmonston strain of attenuated live measles virus, which was named for the student from which Peebles had taken the culture that led to the virus' cultivation.
Dr. Maurice Hilleman of Merck & Co., a pioneer in the development of vaccinations, developed the MMR vaccine in 1971, which treats measles, mumps and rubella in a single shot followed by a booster. One form is called "Attenuvax" with more than 40 peptide sequences. The measles component of the MMR vaccine uses Attenuvax, which is grown in a chick embryo cell culture using the Enders' attenuated Edmonston strain.
Read more about this topic: Measles Vaccine
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