Pasteur Institute of Iran is a medical research center located in Tehran, Iran. The institute is one of the oldest leading research and public health centers in Iran and the Middle East, established in 1920 following an agreement between the Institute Pasteur of Paris and the Iranian government. The Pasteur Institute of Iran was developed with the help of a land donation from Abdol-Hossein Farmanfarma. Its mission is to support advanced research and to provide innovative programs in basic and applied medical sciences, and production of biopharmaceuticals and diagnostic kits with special emphasis on infectious diseases. It meets the specialized and scientific health demands of the local community and tries to establish a link between applied research and industry. Pasteur Institute is a leading regional facility in the development and manufacture of vaccines. The institute has a total staff of 1300 in its 28 departments and 5 branches in different cities of Iran, which are active in different areas of medical and pharmaceutical biotechnology. There are about 300 PhDs and M.Sc. graduates.
This institute is a center that provides public health services and has played a significant role in the prevention and control of infectious diseases in Iran and the world during approximate one hundred years of its activities
Establishment
After the World War I, as Iran was involved in famine and infectious diseases, an agreement was signed between the Pasteur Institute of Paris and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on January 20, 1920, thereby establishing the 10th Pasteur Institute on the International Pasteur Institute's network. Abdol-Hossein Farmanfarma formed the agreement and ensured its subsequent implementation in his brief tenure as Prime Minister of Persia. He made a personal donation of land and buildings to the institute. The first Pasteur Institute, 32 years earlier, had been founded in 1887 in Paris. Louis Pasteur's goal was to establish branches of the Pasteur Institute for fighting infectious diseases worldwide.
In the years before World War II, when the number of laboratories was scarce, most of the country's health problems were resolved through the Pasteur Institute of Iran. Pasteur Institute of Iran is also the first medical institute and research center in the country.
In 1946 a new scientific cooperation agreement was signed between Pasteur Institute of Paris and Pasteur Institute of Iran, based on which Pasteur Institute of Iran became financially and administratively independent. At this time, Dr. Marcel Baltazard came to Tehran as the fourth and last French director. Dr. Baltazard was the director of Pasteur Institute of Iran until 1961 and changed various structures and activities of Pasteur Institute of Iran. After that, he continued to serve as a scientific advisor to Pasteur Institute of Iran until 1966.
Early activities of the institute
In the early years of its establishment, Pasteur Institute of Iran consisted of departments of epidemiology, smallpox, virology, tuberculosis, chemistry, rabies, microbiology, vaccination, inoculants, and BCG.
With the establishment of Pasteur Institute of Iran, inoculants and smallpox vaccines have become common in the country. The vaccines produced by Pasteur Institute of Iran also covered other countries in the region such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Egypt. In the following years, researchers at Pasteur Institute of Iran played an important role in the eradication of smallpox in the Middle East.
Dr. Abolghasem Bahrami went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris in early 1922 and returned to Tehran with a historic Pasteur strain and set up the rabies department at the Pasteur Institute of Iran. Rabies was a serious health problem in the country at the time. The concurrent method of injecting serum and vaccine, demonstrated by Pasteur Institute of Iran, was soon included in the World Health Organization's guidelines for treatment and prevention of rabies. Only with this intervention, Pasteur Institute of Iran could be considered as one of the saviors of humanity. Due to the valuable services of the rabies department at the regional and international level, in 1973, it was selected as the WHO collaborating center for rabies control and research.
BCG department was also established after World War II, and 238 million children from 22 countries used the BCG vaccine produced in Pasteur Institute of Iran. Early in the establishment of Pasteur Institute of Iran, the study of tuberculosis began in the country. After Pasteur Institute of Iran raised the issue of combating tuberculosis in 1952, the TB control organization was set up in the country.