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Hunein Maassab, Who Developed FluMist Vaccine, Dies at 87
Hunein Maassab witnessed a transformational moment in public health when he was a young doctoral student at the University of Michigan. It happened on April 12, 1955, the day his mentor, Dr. Thomas Francis Jr., announced that he had completed a vast field trial involving nearly two million children to determine the effectiveness of what at the time seemed like a miracle drug: a vaccine for polio.
The vaccine had been developed by one of Dr. Francis’s former lab researchers, Jonas Salk, and Dr. Maassab had worked on the field trial, studying blood samples. Listening as Dr. Francis, a renowned virologist who had developed some of the first flu vaccines, described the study in a campus auditorium, Dr. Maassab knew the direction he wanted his life to take.
“That was his initial inspiration, that he wanted to develop something like that for humankind,” Dr. Rashid L. Bashshur, a close friend, said in an interview. “That would make his life worthwhile.”
Nearly half a century later, in June 2003 — after decades of starts and stops, of tinkering and test trials, of government reviews and patent applications and corporate twists — Dr. Maassab’s work came to fruition when the Food and Drug Administration declared a nasal-spray flu vaccine he had developed safe for healthy people ages 5 to 49 who are not pregnant. It carried the brand name FluMist.
Not long afterward, the vaccine was approved for children as young as 2. It is now commonly administered in doctor’s offices and elsewhere, with many people choosing it over an injection.
Dr. Maassab, who was born in Syria and began using John as a first name after he moved to the United States in the late 1940s, was 87 when he died on Feb. 1 in North Carolina. His death, which was not immediately reported by his family, was confirmed by the University of Michigan.
Unlike previous flu vaccines, Dr. Maassab’s spray used a live version of the influenza virus that had been attenuated, or weakened, so as not to cause the flu. He also adapted the vaccine so that it would activate quickly upon entering the body in the relatively cool region of the nasal passages. Getting it right, and getting it approved, took a long, long time.
As early as 1960, he isolated a strain of flu virus for developing a vaccine. By 1967, he had written about his work in the journal Nature. Over the next three decades, working with several colleagues, particularly Dr. Brian R. Murphy at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, he completed the hard work of science — developing dozens of live attenuated viruses, documenting the genetic makeup of certain flu viruses, developing ways of quickly adjusting vaccines to the variants of the flu that emerge each year.
More than 70 studies and trials were conducted, covering more than 9,000 volunteers. By the late 1990s, tests showed that the vaccine successfully prevented the flu 85 percent of the time, a better rate than that for the injected, nonliving vaccine. (Tests since then have shown the nasal spray to be even more effective.) Pharmaceutical companies soon bought rights to develop the drug and made plans to market it as more tolerable to children.
“I feel in a sense that I have accomplished my life’s dream,” Dr. Maassab, who had retired, said after FluMist was finally approved. “I spent all my lifetime developing this vaccine.”
Dr. Maassab was born on June 11, 1926, in Damascus. His father was a jeweler. He enrolled at the University of Missouri, where he received a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1950 and a master’s in physiology and pharmacology in 1952. He then moved to Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in public health in 1954 and his doctorate in epidemiology in 1956.
Survivors include his twin sons, Sammy and Fred. His wife, the former Hilda Zahka, died in 2006.
Dr. Maassab said he was motivated to study the flu by Dr. Salk, by Dr. Francis and by the mysteriousness of the deadly 1918 flu pandemic, which killed tens of millions of people worldwide, including many soldiers fighting in World War I.
“He had to make sure that it meets all kinds of criteria,” Dr. Bashshur, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, said of Dr. Maassab’s long pursuit of FluMist. “He would succeed on one thing and then have to pursue another. He always thought at the end of the day he was going to be able to perfect it. He just knew it. And he had to get the scientific data to support his position.”
He added: “You have to be smart, that goes without saying. But I think his unique characteristic was perseverance. Scientific discovery doesn’t come easy. It’s easy to give up, but he would just never give up.”
William Yardley
The New York Times