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Cutter Laboratories was a family-owned pharmaceutical company located in Berkeley, California, founded by Edward Ahern Cutter in 1897. Cutter's early products included anthrax vaccine, hog cholera (swine fever) virus, and anti-hog cholera serum—and eventually a hog cholera vaccine. The hog cholera vaccine was the first tissue culture vaccine, human or veterinary, ever produced. The company expanded considerably during WWII as a consequence of government contracts for blood plasma and penicillin. After Edward Cutter's death, his three sons—Dr. Robert K. Cutter (president), Edward "Ted" A. Cutter, Jr. (vice-president), and Frederick A. Cutter—ran the company. In the next generation Robert's son David followed his father as president of the company. The Bayer pharmaceutical company bought Cutter Laboratories in 1974.〔("Cutter Laboratories: 1897–1972. A Dual Trust" ). The Bancroft Library, University of California/Berkeley, Regional Oral History Office, Transcript 1972–1974.〕 ==The Cutter incident== On April 12, 1955, Cutter Laboratories became one of several companies that the United States government licensed to produce Salk polio vaccine. In what became known as the Cutter Incident, some lots of the Cutter vaccine—despite passing required safety tests—contained live polio virus in what was supposed to be an inactivated-virus vaccine. Cutter withdrew its vaccine from the market on April 27 after vaccine-associated cases were reported. Surgeon General Scheele sent Drs. William Tripp and Karl Habel from the NIH to inspect Cutter's Berkeley facilities, question workers, and examine records. After a thorough investigation, they found nothing wrong with Cutter's production methods.〔''Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk'', Trident Press, 1966, pp. 313–315.〕 A congressional hearing in June 1955 concluded that the problem was primarily the lack of scrutiny from the NIH Laboratory of Biologics Control (and its excessive trust in the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis reports).〔Edward Shorter, ''The Health Century'', Doubleday, New York, 1987, pp 68–70 ISBN 0-385-24236-0〕 A number of civil lawsuits were filed against Cutter Laboratories in subsequent years, the first of which was (Gottsdanker v. Cutter Laboratories ). The jury found Cutter not negligent, but liable for breach of implied warranty, and awarded the plaintiffs monetary damages. This set a precedent for later lawsuits. All five companies that produced the Salk vaccine in 1955—Eli Lilly, Parke-Davis, Wyeth, Pitman-Moore, and Cutter—had difficulty completely inactivating the polio virus. Three companies other than Cutter were sued, but the cases settled out of court.〔Offit, Paul A. ''The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis'', Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 100, 116–19, 133. ISBN 0-300-10864-8〕 The Cutter incident was one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in U.S. history, and exposed several thousand children to live polio virus on vaccination. The NIH Laboratory of Biologics Control, which had certified the Cutter polio vaccine, had received advance warnings of problems: in 1954, staff member Dr. Bernice Eddy had reported to her superiors that some inoculated monkeys had become paralyzed (pictures were sent as well). William Sebrell, the director of NIH wouldn't hear of such a thing.〔 The mistake produced 120,000 doses of polio vaccine that contained live polio virus. Of children who received the vaccine, 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis (a form of the disease that does not involve the central nervous system), 56 developed paralytic poliomyelitis—and of these, five children died from polio. The exposures led to an epidemic of polio in the families and communities of the affected children, resulting in a further 113 people paralyzed and 5 deaths.〔 The director of the microbiology institute lost his job, as did the equivalent of the assistant secretary for health. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby stepped down. Dr Sebrell, the director of the NIH, resigned.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cutter Laboratories」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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