Rotavirus History

If you have a young child, it's a good chance he'll suffer a rotavirus infection by the time he turns 5 unless he's been vaccinated. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, rotavirus is a leading cause of diarrhea and severe gastrointestinal illness in young children. In developed countries, this virus is rarely deadly. However, in many countries rotavirus is a leading contributor to high mortality rates--this despite strides made starting in the 1970s to discover the clues to this illness that eventually led to a vaccine.

Discovery

• Dr. Ruth Bishop is credited as the discoverer of the rotavirus in humans. She isolated the virus in cells taken from the intestines of kids with severe gastrointestinal disorder, according to the National Institutes of Health. The Australian coined the term "duovirus," because the virus was found in a portion of the intestine called the duodenum.

Terminology

• In 1974, a year after Bishop's discovery, Irish Dr. Thomas Henry Flewett suggested the name we know the virus by today. Flewett noted that the virus looked like a circle, so he called it "rotavirus," in a nod to the Latin word rota for wheel.

Research

• Dr. Richard Ward, of what is now part of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, began the journey to develop a vaccine for the rotavirus in the early 1980s. He was later joined by Dr. David Bernstein. By the mid-1980s, the doctors began to experiment with a vaccine in adult volunteers, attempting to isolate the smallest dose that would cause rotavirus infection. The first studies with children came a few years later, in 1988, when the vaccine was administered to more than 200 children. It was a failure, according to information from the Cincinnati Children's official Web site.

Strides

• Thanks to this failure, according to Cincinnati Children's, the doctors found out more about how the body responds. They develop a live, but weakened, strain that would prompt an immune response but would not cause illness. With the backing of the National Institutes of Health, the doctors gave a rotavirus vaccine another shot, and launched the first trials to test the vaccine in adults in 1994 in conjunction with the company Avant Immunotherapeutics.

Trials

• Phase I, with adults, was a success. Not only was an immune response achieved, but the adult volunteers didn't experience any of the side effects, such as vomiting and diarrhea. A year later, it was time for the first trials in children. The success with these trials led to a larger trial in another year. In 2003, health care giant GlaxoSmithKline jumped on board to support the research--eventually testing about 75,000 children.

Vaccine

• The results of these tests eventually led to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve the vaccine Rotarix in 2008, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its use is now licensed in more than 100 countries, and upwards of 25 million doses of Rotarix have been administered worldwide.