Abstract
Rino Rappuoli is a graduate of Siena University, where he also earned his PhD before moving to the Sclavo Research Center, the Italian vaccine institute, also in Siena. He then spent two years in the USA, mostly at Harvard with John Murphy and Alwin Pappenheimer working on a new diphtheria vaccine based on a non-toxic mutant of diphtheria toxin which has since become the basis for conjugate vaccines against haemophilus, meningococcus, and pneumococcal infections, before returning to the Sclavo Research Center where he developed an acellular vaccine based on a mutant pertussis toxin. With many achievements in vaccine development to his credit, he is now Global Head of Vaccines Research and Development for Novartis Vaccines in Siena, and has most recently pioneered reverse vaccinology, in which the genome of the pathogen is screened for candidate antigenic and immunogenic vaccine components. We spoke to him about the potential for outbreaks of the kind we are now seeing with Ebolavirus in West Africa, and what can be done to prevent them.
Highlights
Rino Rappuoli is a graduate of Siena University, where he earned his PhD before moving to the Sclavo Research Center, the Italian vaccine institute, in Siena
Ebolavirus disease has been much in the news recently because of the horrendous outbreak in West Africa – but how many other rare, sporadic but severe infections are there that pose an equal threat? Well, during the last few years, more or less with every 6 months to a year there has been a new outbreak of an emerging infection
I know that there are ’flu vaccines, but are there licensed vaccines for any of the others? The answer is no - there are no vaccines for SARS, which emerged in 2003, there is no licensed vaccine for MERS, there is no licensed vaccine for Chikungunya, there is no licensed vaccine for Ebola - so for most of these diseases there are no vaccines, because they are too rare to justify the economic investment
Summary
Rino Rappuoli is a graduate of Siena University, where he earned his PhD before moving to the Sclavo Research Center, the Italian vaccine institute, in Siena. Well, during the last few years, more or less with every 6 months to a year there has been a new outbreak of an emerging infection.
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