The Prince of Asturias Foundation
Manuel Elkin Patarroyo was born in Ataco (Colombia) in 1946. A Doctor of Medicine and Surgery from the National University of Colombia, he broadened his studies in Immunology and Virology in the USA and Sweden. Founder, in 1984, and director of the Institute of Immunology at the San Juan de Dios Hospital, He lectures at the National University of Colombia and is an associate professor at the University of Yale and the Rockefeller University New York (United States), and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Sweden).
He is the author of the first synthetic vaccine created in the world for the prevention of malaria that has been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO), the organisation to which he ceded the patent. This vaccine was successfully tested on more than 40,000 people in areas which suffer malaria epidemics (Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil and, more recently, several African countries). Malaria is a tropical disease which causes the death of between three and five million people every year, giving rise to between 300 and 500 million clinical cases worldwide. The vaccine created by Patarroyo combats one of the most virulent forms of the disease (scientifically named SPf66) and has proved to be effective for between 40% and 66% of adults and 77% of children under five. Despite offers to work in research centres in the rest of the world, he decided to settle in his own country, Colombia, working with a small interdisciplinary team and with scant resources, managing to form a major research group. The school he promoted has trained several hundred of scientists. Speaker at more than five hundred international symposia and at innumerable national symposia and congresses, he is author of nearly two hundred international scientific papers.
Since 1991, he has become a member of the Science Academies of various countries, such as Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Ecuador and Peru, of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Madrid and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery of Galicia, among other institutions. He holds honorary doctorates from several universities, including the Complutense and Autonomous Universities of Madrid, La Laguna University of Tenerife and the National University of Athens. Patarroyo has received the Excellence Award in Latin American Research granted by the Swedish Nobel Academy (1990), the award of the Third World Academy of Science (1990), the Robert Koch Award of the Foundation of the same name (Germany, 1994), the León Bernard Foundation Prize (WHO, 1995) and the 2011 Prince of Viana Prize for Solidarity, among others. He holds numerous distinctions, such as the Edinburgh International Medal of Science, the Cruz de Boyacá, the highest distinction of Colombia, as well as the rank of Officer of the French Legion of Honour and Commander of the Order of Isabella the Catholic.
