Fighting a killer disease

Using biochemistry to fight a disease that can threaten children’s lives is an important part of Julianne Hogan’s job. She’s a development scientist at Wyeth BioPharma in Grange Castle, Dublin

Her team manufactures a vaccine for meningitis. Meningitis is a disease that can be caused by a virus or bacteria and it is particularly common in small children. Its symptoms include a rash, fever and difficulty breathing.

Vaccine

“With a vaccine, you introduce the small safe part of a bacteria to the body so that if the body ever meets it again, it’ll know how to deal with it straight off,” says Julianne.

So how is the vaccine produced? “The bacteria has polysaccharide (or sugar) units coming from its cell wall – and it is these sugar units that the body recognises as foreign,” she says. The scientists take the sugar units and attach them to a protein, gluing them together with a method called conjugation.

They then purify the result in an ultrafiltration system. This produces the vaccine, which is taken off site to be prepared for use in the vaccination clinic.

Love of science

“I was always really interested in science,” says Julianne. “I loved biology and chemistry and so I decided on industrial biochemistry in the University of Limerick and then I moved to Cork.  I was working for a cancer research company there.”

Julianne is also part of Wyeth’s emergency response team. This is a team of specially trained employees who can act quickly if there’s an incident such as a fire, chemical spill or evacuation. “It’s good to be prepared,” says Julianne.

Julieanne’s hobby is running. “It’s a good stress buster, especially after a long day,” she says. She ran the Dublin Marathon in 2004 and hopes to run it again.

“I love this job because it has such variety in it,” says Julianne. “We are manufacturing a vaccine that is going to be able to save the lives of thousands of children. Over a million children a year die of meningitis, so it’s so worthwhile to be involved in a project such as that.”

Learn more:

Find out what is meningitis and what are the symptoms

Visit Wyeth Ireland on the web

Learn about how vaccines work