Stuart K. Hayashi
The following is a section of the longer essay, “How Billionaires and Capitalism Save Billions of Lives — Including Yours.” That essay includes an index listing various case studies of a for-profit initiative saving lives. The blog post below is of at least one such case study. You can return to that index here.
Besides the ones for COVID-19 and the rotavirus, there are other profitable lifesaving vaccines. Among them is the one for the bacterium
Haemophilus influenzaea Type B — “HiB,” for short. HiB has frequently caused childhood meningitis, which, in turn, often led to paralysis, deafness, blindness, developmental disabilities, and death.
In 1968, microbiologists Porter W. Anderson and David Hamilton Smith began researching methods for addressing HiB. This bacterium was protected by a casing of sugars called polysaccharides. For that reason, their vaccine contained the HiB’s polysaccharides so that the immune system could orient itself with this component and thus attack the entire bacterium. When testing this vaccine on animals yielded ambiguous results, however, the duo ended up testing the vaccine on themselves. That worked, and, in 1975, they had the first major clinical trials in a study on 100,000 Finnish children.
Yet they were not even close to success. Children older than two-and-a-half years became immune to HiB, but babies younger than that remained vulnerable. For these infants, Anderson and Smith had to develop another version. The new one already contained the HiB’s polysaccharides, but added to that was a larger protein from a second type of bacterium. It was this larger protein that alerted the immune system of infants and therefore enabled it to recognize the HiB’s subtler polysaccharides and form antibodies to attack them. This was the victory for which Anderson and Smith had persisted. It took them fifteen years from the start of their collaboration to make it this far.
Despite this breakthrough, existing pharmaceutical companies gave these two scientists the brushoff. David Hamilton Smith therefore had to start one of his own, Praxis Biologics, to put their treatment into practice.
In 1987, when the vaccine first entered the market, the United States experienced 20,000 HiB infections. A decade later, that figure
was down to 87 cases. ScienceHeroes.Com
estimates that this vaccine has saved over 5 million lives.
