October 2006 Under the Microscope One St. Jude researcher battles to stave off the next pandemic By Donnie snow
St. Jude researcher Robert Webster
Robert Webster may be the man standing between us and the chilling scenario of influenza onslaught the likes of which the world has not seen for nearly a hundred years.
Few viral outbreaks rival the devastating 1918 pandemic of “Spanish influenza” that killed an estimated 40–50 million people, but Webster, internationally celebrated flu expert and head of virology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, believes the current killer strain of Avian Flu [H5N1] popping up in Asia could be worse.
“There has never been anything like it,” says Webster, director the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Laboratory on the Ecology of Influenza Viruses in Lower Animals and Birds. “I have been working with flu all my life, and H5N1 is the worst I have ever seen. If it spreads to humans, God help us.”
During the last pandemic, the “Hong Kong influenza” outbreak in 1968 that killed two million people, Webster traveled to China to personally collect samples for vaccine research. It was not the first or last time the staid professor left his ordered laboratory to get his hands dirty in the trenches.
When a new flu emerged in Hong Kong in 1997, killing poultry and jumping directly to humans, killing eight people, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sent New Zealand-born Webster to identify the culprit: H5N1. Webster determined how it spread through poultry and to humans, and insisted on the killing of 1.5 million chickens to halt the epidemic. He also recommended changes to Hong Kong authorities aimed at stopping the spread of viruses among chickens.
Webster remains a scientist who crusades from the front, although now in his 80s, he’s more apt to be mistaken for Sean Connery than Harrison Ford. And with the world looking to science for safeguards against a flu strain toting a 60% mortality rate, it is Webster’s team with the most encouraging results, including a potential vaccine.
In May, St. Jude virologist Richard Webby successfully vaccinated mice and ferrets with a DNA vaccine formulated with the commercially available adjuvant Vaxfectin(TM), owned by San Diego-based Vical.
Both Webster and Webby have been recognized by Scientific American magazine as leading researchers, with Webster named by the magazine as one of the top 50 science and technology leaders of last year.
Webster, whose lab is the only one in the world designed to study flu at the animal-human interface, routinely serves as an expert source for network and cable news outlets, as well as for numerous national newspapers and medical journals whenever there’s an outbreak of the flu.
Long considered a last hope for the world’s sickest children, Memphis’ St. Jude might seem an odd place for the world’s leading influenza expert, save for a simple, chilling truth: “Influenza kills kids,” Webster says.
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