Yellow fever vaccine Foundation to improve the vaccine from the "Asibi" strain, discovered that a favorable chance mutation in the attenuated virus had produced a highly efficacious strain that was named 17D. After field trials in Brazil, over one million people were vaccinated by 1939, without severe complications. For his work on the yellow fever vaccine, Theiler received the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Only the 17D vaccine remains in use today. The outbreak of yellow fever in Angola in January 2016 has raised concerns about whether the global supply of vaccine is adequate to meet the need during a large
Max Theiler Medical School, King's College London, and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1922, he was awarded a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene; he became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of London and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Theiler wanted to pursue a career in research, so in 1922, he took a position at the Harvard University School of Tropical Medicine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He spent several years investigating amoebic dysentery and trying to develop a vaccine for rat-bite fever. After becoming assistant to Andrew Sellards, he started