John Bennett Robbins (December 1, 1932—November 27, 2019) was a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), best known for his contribution to the development of the vaccine against bacterial meningitis (Haemophilus influenzae type b )Hib)) with his colleague Rachel Schneerson.
During his tenure, he worked in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the Food and Drug Administration’s biologics laboratories on location.
He held the position of Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York for 3 years before beginning his career at the NICHD as a part of the NIH in 1970.
In 1969, Robbins met Rachel Schneerson, a Polish Immigrant who had trained in Israel and had arrived in New York to be an instructor in the Department of Pediatrics and the Laboratory of Immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
[2] The two became a research team, “dedicated to developing vaccines to protect children from bacterial diseases.” Robbins and Schneerson came to the NICHD in 1970 after being recruited by the Institute’s then Scientific Director Charles Lowe.
Other outcomes of an Hib discovery include some of the scourges of childhood illness—including bacterial meningitis and its attendant intellectual disabilities and deafness—as well as epiglottitis, arthritis, osteomyelitis and pneumonia.
Robbins’s vaccine protects infants from bacterial meningitis caused by Hib which increases the risk factor of acquired permanent brain damage, deafness, or death.
Since 1970, Professor Porter W. Anderson, Jr. and Dr. David H. Smith of Harvard University alongside Dr. Robbins and Dr. Rachel Schneerson of the NICH researched the mechanisms of disease and vaccine development for Hib through the NIH.
Many scientists believed that a polysaccharide-based vaccine would never work because immature defenses of the infant's immune system were not savvy enough to detect the polysaccharide and make antibodies.
Robbins and Schneerson tried a new process: They linked the weak polysaccharide to a protein carrier on the bacterium’s outer capsule, one that was easily recognized by the immature immune system of infants, to boost its antigenicity.
The conjugate vaccine for Hib produced high antibody levels, well above what was needed for protection, among infants from injections starting at age 2 months and persisting for years beyond.
In 1972, Anderson and Smith collaborated with the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston and the University of Rochester to make the first polysaccharide-conjugate vaccines to be tested in adults and infants.
Their efforts led to the development and licensing of vaccines against pertussis[5] (whooping cough), typhoid, Staphylococcus infections[6] (pneumonia, aureus, and Group B), certain types of malaria, and anthrax.
Additional information about their more recent research is available at http://2012annualreport.nichd.nih.gov/pdmi.html Professional Awards: Two weeks before his death, a conjugate typhoid vaccine rollout provided 10 million inoculations to children in Pakistan.