The "Jenner-ex" Story
Jennerex is named in honor of the legendary physician Dr. Edward Jenner.
Dr. Jenner's discovery of vaccination with a live virus led to the eradication of the worst medical scourge in the history of humankind: smallpox, a viral infection. Smallpox reportedly killed more people-mainly infants and children-than all other infections combined. Jenner used a cowpox virus to vaccinate people and protect them against smallpox starting in 1796, and 200 years later smallpox was eradicated. The team of medical pioneers at Jennerex has now created therapeutics, engineered from the same class of viruses used by Dr. Jenner to eradicate smallpox that are designed to eradicate cancers.
Edward Jenner (1749-1823), after training in London and a period as an army surgeon, spent his whole career as a country doctor in his native county of Gloucestershire in the West of England. His research was based on careful case-studies and clinical observation more than a hundred years before scientists could explain the viruses themselves. He achieved this historic triumph with the help of a country milkmaid. She observed that milkmaids would not contract smallpox. He discovered that they were being "vaccinated" with a cow virus (cowpox) during their milking duties. He then used this cowpox virus to vaccinate people and protect them against smallpox starting in 1796. So successful did his innovation prove that by 1840 the British government had banned alternative preventive treatments against smallpox. "Vaccination," the word Jenner invented for his treatment (from the Latin vacca, a cow), was adopted by Pasteur for immunization against any disease.
In the eighteenth century, before Jenner, smallpox was a killer disease, as widespread as cancer in the twentieth century, but with the difference that the majority of its victims were infants and young children. In 1980, as a result of Jenner's discovery, the World Health Assembly officially declared "the world and its peoples" free from endemic smallpox. The year 1996 marked the two hundredth anniversary of Edward Jenner's first experimental vaccination with the related cowpox virus to build immunity against the deadly scourge of smallpox.
