Inge Leonard has died at age 85.
Born Inge Adele Zanger in Neandertal, Germany, Leonard’s first job was in the food industry in the microbiology side of quality control.
In 1957, she travelled to Australia on a working holiday with then-husband. She found employument as a technician in a Randwick-based veterinary biological company, Biological Institute of Australia (BIO).
BIO and its competitor, Webster’s Vaccines, formed a joint venture, and the recently remarried Leonard began work at the company in vaccine production.
At this point, few techniques had been developed for laboratory production of vaccines. Leonard’s determination to master the skill of scaling-up production of tissue-cell cultures would prove instrumental in the growth of veterinary viral vaccines.
Under Leonard’s guidance, by the mid-1970s Webster’s had become the major supplier of vaccines to the Australian poultry industry. Several vaccines developed by the company in conjunction with Sydney University were produced under Leonard’s supervision.
In the 1980s, her laboratories produced many new viral vaccines – including the world’s first canine parvovirus vaccine.
Leonard is survived by her husband, Eddie, and her siblings Ernst and Gertrude.