Polio: How Cell Culture Solved the Problem and Started the Bioprocess Industry
Tuesday, December 11, 2007, 12:00 PM Eastern Time (ET)

Polio epidemics swept cities in North America almost every summer until Jonas Salk and his team, supported by the March of Dimes, developed the first successful vaccine in the early 1950s. A major road block was how to mass produce the polio virus in cell culture at a time when cultures were still being grown on plasma clots in tubes and small glass T-flasks. This webinar will cover the breakthroughs that enabled researchers to mass produce the virus and conquer this dread disease. In doing so, they laid the foundation for a bioprocess industry that now produces cell-based vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and drugs worth tens of billions of dollars annually.

Speaker: John Ryan, Ph.D.

John Ryan, Ph.D., has spent over 32 years in the fields of both animal and plant cell culture. He received his initial culture training during the nine years he spent at the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York. There he was a member of the Center's Education Department that offered a wide variety of undergraduate and postgraduate training programs in plant and animal cell culture techniques. Since then, he has worked for over thirteen years with Corning Life Sciences, where he is currently Technical Marketing Manager. He has also worked at Bionique Testing Laboratories, the American Type Culture Collection, and the University of Connecticut from where he received his doctorate in Biochemistry.

We hope you will join us for this exclusive event.