The advantage of producing vaccines in mammalian cell lines is that large quantities of different vaccines and gene products can be produced within a very short time. Friedrich Dorner pursued this technology at the pharmaceutical company Baxter. A native of Graz, Austria, Dorner is considered one of the world’s leading experts in vaccine development.
Dorner studied chemistry in Vienna, then went to the USA. After studies at Harvard, he returned to the Sandoz Research Institute in Vienna and worked on interferons and bacterial toxins. In the mid-1970s, he moved to the Swiss Serum and Vaccine Institute in Bern, where he developed, among other things, an oral vaccine against typhoid fever. In 1981 he returned to Vienna, and in 1995 he was appointed head of biotechnology at Immuno. In 2003, he became a board member at Baxter.
For his research work, Dorner received, among others, the Austrian Hygiene Prize, the Grand Decoration of Honor in Gold for services to the Republic of Austria and to the province of Lower Austria.