Marina Voroshilova
Marina Konstantinovna Voroshilova was a Soviet virologist and corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR. She is best known for her work on the introduction of vaccines against poliomyelitis, the discovery of non-specific effects of oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV), and developing the concept of beneficial human viruses.
Biography
Voroshilova was born on March 16, 1922, in Simferopol in the family of attorney at law Konstantin Konstantinovich Voroshilov, a politician of the White Movement of Crimea, who was the Chairman of the Council of People's Representatives in 1917-1918. After the Bolsheviks took power in the Crimea, the family was forced to hide and moved to Kazan, where Voroshilov was well known as the son of the founder of the Department of Physiology, Rector of the Kazan Imperial University Konstantin Vasilievich Voroshilov. After the death of her father in 1929, Marina and her mother moved to Moscow, where she graduated from the First Moscow Medical Institute in 1944. She was the head of laboratory at the Institute and worked to develop prophylactic vaccines against the disease. In 1958-1959, together with Mikhail Chumakov, she organized the world's first mass production and clinical trials of a live polio vaccine made from attenuated Sabin strains. The collaboration between scientists in the US and the USSR collaboration led to visits between the two countries which were tracked in the United States by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The visits between the United States and Russia were also covered in the media. While developing the vaccines, she first tested them on herself, her husband, and her children.In 1960-1970, Voroshilova discovered non-specific protective effects against diseases caused by unrelated viruses. She had been studying human enteroviruses, the vast majority of which are non-pathogenic and cause asymptomatic infection and determined that they could have beneficial properties for human health. Based on this concept of beneficial viruses, Voroshilova developed a series of live attenuated enterovirus vaccines that were used along with polio vaccine for non-specific prevention of influenza. She established the possibility of viral oncolysis of tumor cells by non-pathogenic enteroviruses and conducted studies of the possibility of treating cancer with live enterovirus vaccines, based on the stimulation of innate immunity. After her death, the State Committee of the Council of Ministers of the USSR for Inventions and Discoveries issued a diploma certifying this discovery. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers revisited Voroshilova's research on the use of live vaccines for polio as protection against other viruses such as influenza because of the possibility that this would lead to protection against COVID-19.
Voroshilova died on November 19, 1987.