Ruth Sunday nut branch

Ruth Sonntag Nussenzweig , also cited as Ruth S. Nussenzweig, (born June 20, 1928 in Vienna ; † April 1, 2018 ) was a Brazilian parasitologist who was best known for research on malaria vaccines.

Life

As a Jew, she emigrated with her family from Vienna to São Paulo in Brazil in 1939 . Both parents were doctors. From 1948 she studied medicine with a focus on parasitology at the University of São Paulo , graduating in 1953. There she researched the transmission of Chagas disease with the professor of parasitology Samuel Pessoa in collaboration with her future husband Victor Nussenzweig (also a medical student) with blood transfusion. Originally, they wanted to find a cancer cure with it (inspired by Russian work at the time), instead they found that gentian violet kills the pathogen. From 1954 she was an assistant professor in Parasitology in São Paulo. In 1958 she was at the Collège de France . In 1961/62 she did research at the Escola Paulista da Medicina with Otto Bier . In 1963 she conducted research at the Medical Center of New York University with Baruj Benacerraf and Zoltan Overy. In 1964 she wanted to return to São Paulo, but because of the political climate in Brazil (military coup), she went back to New York University, where she became Assistant Professor in 1965 , Associate Professor in 1968 and Professor in 1972. In 1976 she became Head of Parasitology in the Faculty of Microbiology, where she was CV Starr Professor of Molecular and Medical Parasitology . In 1983 she was visiting professor at Harvard University (School of Public Health).

She had been married to Victor Nussenzweig, professor of preventive medicine at New York University, since 1953. They had two sons and a daughter who are all doctors. One of her sons is Michel Nussenzweig .

research

In the early 1950s she and her husband demonstrated the transmission of Chagas disease by blood transfusion and found a method to prevent this by adding a chemical. She also did research on the epidemiology of toxoplasmosis .

Sonntag Nussenzweig was doing basic research for the development of malaria vaccines, something she had been doing in New York since the 1960s. At that time the search for vaccines against malaria was generally regarded as hopeless, but it found a work by English scientists from 1925 in which a vaccination against the malaria variant in birds with sporozoites that had lost their infectivity after exposure to UV radiation was successful. She repeated the experiments with success on various malaria pathogens in the mouse model, the sporozoites being treated with X-rays, and also in monkeys. Experiments with volunteers (prisoners) and Plasmodium falciparum sporozoites were also successful. The vaccination was only effective against malaria pathogens in the sporozoite stage. A vaccine developed on this basis was tested in field studies in Africa (2011) and achieved a protection level of 30 to 50% (but required two vaccinations and the immunization lasted a maximum of 18 months). She and her husband were also involved in the development of vaccines against Plasmodium vivax , which is endemic to the Amazon, Asia and Central America .

Her research group in New York also found a common antigen from the surface of the sporozoites of very different types of malaria (malaria that affects monkeys, rodents and humans), the CS protein (major sporozoite protein). They cloned and sequenced CS. It was widely used in both epidemiological and molecular biological studies of malaria and in research into new vaccines.

Awards and memberships

In 1985 she received the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize . In 1984 she became an honorary member of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. In 1985 Nussenzweig and her husband were awarded the Carlos J. Finlay Prize by UNESCO . Ruth Sonntag Nussenzweig has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1992, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences since 1998 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2013 . In 2015 she was awarded the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize .

family

Ruth Nussenzweig had three children with her husband Victor Nussenzweig , all of whom followed the scientific model of their parents: the physicians Michel C. Nussenzweig and Andre Nussenzweig and the anthropologist Sonia Nussenzweig.

literature

• Robert A. Seder and Fidel Zavala: Ruth S. Nussenzweig (1928–2018). Immunologist who paved the way to a malaria vaccine. In: Nature . Volume 557, 2018, p. 310, doi: 10.1038 / d41586-018-05102-3

Web links

• Biography at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Portuguese
• Website at New York University
• Biography, English

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ruth Nussenzweig, precursora no estudo da vacina contra a malária, morre aos 89 , accessed on April 3, 2018