Britannica Sources used in this answer

Why was growing poliovirus in tissue culture an important step toward creating a vaccine?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Polio vaccine — polio A health care worker giving a polio vaccine to a child in Katsina state, Nigeria, 2014.

Growing the poliovirus in tissue culture was a critical advancement because it provided a safe and efficient method to produce the virus in large quantities.12

Prior to this breakthrough by John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins, the only way to cultivate the virus was within the nerve tissue of living monkeys. This older method was not only difficult to scale but also resulted in vaccine products that were proven to be dangerous to humans.1

By successfully cultivating the virus in test tubes using non-nerve tissue from human embryos and monkeys, the researchers bypassed the need for live animal hosts. This achievement directly enabled Jonas Salk to develop the effective inactivated poliovirus vaccine, which was essential for breaking the cycle of polio epidemics in the 1950s.123