Vir­ginia native Col. Don­ald “Gray” Hep­p­ner Jr. has won the Kiwa­nis 2009 World Ser­vice Award. Hep­p­ner won the award for his work devel­op­ing a malaria fight­ing vaccine.

From the Rich­mond Times Dis­patch, writer Christa Desrets gives us more back­ground on Heppner’s work.

After study­ing infec­tious dis­eases at the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia and com­plet­ing inter­nal train­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota, he began work­ing at the Wal­ter Reed Army Insti­tute of Research.

“It was really a dynamic and inspir­ing place,” he said, where he and about 2,000 employ­ees are con­nected to the trop­i­cal world through over­seas lab­o­ra­to­ries, field sites and more than 40 years of work. They also work with Glax­o­SmithK­line phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foun­da­tion “right in the heart of where trop­i­cal dis­eases afflict peo­ple most.”

In the early 1990s, Hep­p­ner vol­un­teered to be a test sub­ject for a malaria vac­cine. He said the process involved hold­ing his arm to a card­board cup that con­tained five mos­qui­toes car­ry­ing malaria — he related it to receiv­ing a week’s worth of expo­sure to the dis­ease in five minutes.

“The worst part,” he said, “was actu­ally real­iz­ing the vac­cine wasn’t effective.”

The next-worst part was liv­ing through the flu­like symp­toms and the side effects of treat­ment, he said. “Both of those expe­ri­ences con­vinced me of the need for a malaria vac­cine,” he said.

That’s where the vac­cine (known as RTS,S) comes in, Hep­p­ner said.

“We’ve worked for more than 20 years on this promis­ing RTS,S vac­cine,” he said. “We’ve tested it here, we’ve tested it in Eng­land, in Asia and in Africa.… It looks like it would reduce severe malaria by 50 per­cent, and that’s huge.”

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