How did Jonas Salk’s team produce large amounts of polio vaccine?

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Infographic showing estimated lives saved by childhood vaccinations worldwide from 1974 to 2024, with syringe-shaped bars for each disease. Measles tops the list at 93.71 million lives saved, followed by tetanus, whooping cough, and others, for a total of 153.84 million lives saved. — vaccine Vaccines and the estimates of lives saved over the period 1974–2024.

Jonas Salk and his team were able to produce the polio vaccine in large quantities by developing a method to cultivate the poliovirus in monkey kidney tissue.1

This breakthrough was built upon earlier foundational research by John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins, who had previously demonstrated that the virus could be grown in large amounts using tissue culture techniques. By utilizing these methods, Salk successfully developed an effective inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), which was subsequently distributed in hundreds of millions of doses following the success of the 1954–55 field trials.23