Pablo Valenzuela Valdés
He was on the team that made the first recombinant vaccine in history — for hepatitis B — and on the one that identified the hepatitis C virus.
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Until 1986, the hepatitis B vaccine was made from the plasma of infected people. It was expensive, scarce and depended on an awkward supply chain. The vaccine that replaced it uses no virus at all: it uses yeast into which the gene for one of the virus's proteins has been inserted.
It was the first recombinant vaccine in history, and the team that made it — at Chiron, the company he co-founded in 1981 — had its research side led by a biochemist from the Universidad de Chile.
A vaccine and a test
The first recombinant vaccine
Instead of culturing the virus, the gene for its surface antigen is inserted into yeast, which produces the protein at industrial scale. Business Week named it one of the three most innovative technology products of 1986.
Identifying a virus nobody had seen
The Chiron team identified the agent behind what until then was called «non-A, non-B hepatitis» and developed the test to detect it. Since then, donated blood is screened worldwide with that test.
The second is the less well known and perhaps the farther-reaching of the two: before that test existed, receiving a transfusion carried a real risk of contracting hepatitis C, an infection that can end in cirrhosis or liver cancer decades later. Screening blood banks cut off that route of transmission.
Santiago, Northwestern, San Francisco, Santiago
Born in Santiago
On 13 June.
Doctorate in Chemistry
Northwestern University. Later, a postdoc at the University of California.
Returns to Chile
Takes charge of the Biochemistry Laboratory.
Co-founds Chiron Corporation
With William J. Rutter and Edward Penhoet. He was its Vice President of Research and Development until 1994.
Founds GrupoBios
Chile's first biotechnology company.
Founds the Fundación Ciencia & Vida
With Mario Rosemblatt and Bernardita Méndez.
Premio Nacional de Ciencias Aplicadas y Tecnológicas
UCSF Medal
From the University of California, San Francisco.
the worldwide impact his technological findings have had
Ruling of the jury for the 2002 Premio Nacional de Ciencias Aplicadas y Tecnológicas (Chile's national prize for applied and technological sciences), translated from Spanish
Getting Chilean science to produce something
What sets Valenzuela apart from most Premio Nacional laureates is that his career ran through both the laboratory and the company, and that he returned to Chile precisely to build that combination: Bios Chile in 1986, the Fundación Ciencia & Vida in 1997, and later Andes Biotechnologies.
His diagnosis of why that is so hard is unusually frank: the problem is not that talent is missing on either side, but that each side is ignorant of the other's trade.
Scientists are usually not good at seizing opportunities and developing applications, and those who apply things are poor at understanding the basic mechanisms that will make them work.
Pablo Valenzuela, translated from Spanish
What the sources do not quite settle
He was born on 13 June 1941 in Santiago and earned his doctorate at Northwestern in 1970.
The Universidad Católica and the English Wikipedia agree.
He co-founded Chiron in 1981 with William J. Rutter and Edward Penhoet, and was its Vice President of R&D until 1994.
Recorded by the Universidad Católica and by the Fundación Ciencia & Vida.
The quote about scientists and appliers is verbatim.
It was drawn from a talk reproduced in a secondary source and could not be checked against an original transcript.
- Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Ficha oficial de Premios Nacionales, con el fallo del jurado
View source → - Universidad de Chile. Perfil oficial de Premios Nacionales
View source → - Fundación Ciencia & Vida. Ficha de la fundación que cofundó
View source → - Cooperativa (2002). Anuncio del Premio Nacional
View source →
How to cite
This is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, as long as you give credit.
FísicaEterna. (2026). Pablo Valenzuela Valdés — biography, FísicaEterna. Retrieved [access date] from https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/pablo-valenzuela
@misc{fisicaeterna_pablo_valenzuela,
author = {FísicaEterna},
title = {Pablo Valenzuela Valdés — biography, FísicaEterna},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/pablo-valenzuela},
note = {CC BY 4.0}
}