Manuel Elkin Patarroyo

Manuel Elkin Patarroyo ( born November 3, 1946 in Ataco, Tolima, Colombia) is a Colombian immunologist, known by the development of a synthetic vaccine against malaria in the 1980s.

Patarroyo studied medicine at the National University of Colombia, then went with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation at Yale University and in 1984 received his doctorate at Rockefeller University under Robert Bruce Merrifield and Henry G. Kunkel. He then returned to Colombia, where he set up the National Institute of Immunology that was connected to the Hospital San Juan de Dios in Bogota, an existing clinic since 1723, but which was closed for financial reasons in 1999.

In 1987, he developed a synthetic vaccine against malaria ( SPf66 ), which was tested in field tests of the WHO in Gambia, Tanzania, Thailand and South America. Despite extremely lucrative offers from various pharmaceutical companies, he also transferred the patent for the first version of his 1995 free vaccine to the WHO and urged that it was developed and produced in Colombia in order to keep the price low. The WHO has established the vaccine but not to a greater extent, since it was the success rate (formation of enough antibodies in the vaccinated for resistance ) is too low. Initially promising subsequent field studies in Africa have been disappointing.

Patarroyo who felt the negative criticism of his first vaccine as partially supported by prejudice against scientists in the Third World, developing improved vaccines in Colombia, where malaria is a serious health problem.

In 1994 he was awarded the Robert Koch Prize with Volkmar Braun and the Prince of Asturias Award.