San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Chemist helped body accept vaccines
Anyone who has received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine for COVID19 has been touched by the biochemistry of Frank F. Davis of El Cerrito.
Davis invented a method of chemical camouflage called PEGylation that is injected to protect the human immune system from rejecting foreign compounds. Invented in 1970, the delivery system is commonly used in chemotherapy. But nothing compares to its widespread use in the coronavirus vaccine. That has brought renewed recognition to Davis 50 years after he brought his chemical breakthrough into the pharmaceutical industry.
Davis was at work on an article explaining the importance of PEGylation in the delivery of mRNA in the vaccine when he was hit with pneumonia on May 14. He died five days later, leaving completion of the article in the hands of cowriter Ann Davis, an Oakland science journalist who is also his daughter. He was 100.
“He wanted people to understand the value of protecting humanity from preventable diseases,” said Ann Davis, who confirmed her father’s death. “The reason he invented PEGylation is because until the late 1960s most bio-medicines would be attacked and destroyed by the immune system. He worked to reverse that.”
Davis was at the forefront of the biopharmaceutical revolution. Among the Bay Area biotech firms to use PEGylation in its compounds are Amgen, Genentech and Mountain View Pharmaceuticals. Davis also founded his own firm, Enzon Pharmaceuticals, to develop biological drugs for rare afflictions such as severe combined immunodeficiency disease, commonly known as bubble boy disease. The company is publicly traded.
“Frank Davis made major contributions to the pharmaceutical field,” said Robert Langer, an esteemed professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “His work on disguising molecules from the body’s immune system ... led to a number of lifesaving pharmaceuticals including Mircera for treating anemia and Neulasta, which boosts white cell counts after cancer chemotherapy.”
According to an article in Science Magazine, the COVID19 vaccine represents the first time PEGylation has been used in an approved vaccine. The article also suggested PEG may have caused rare allergic reactions in people who received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
What makes Davis’ achievement remarkable is that he did not begin college until he was 27 and had served as a fighter plane mechanic in North Africa during World
War II. Advised at every step that he was too old to begin a career in scientific academia, he did it anyway, completing his doctorate in biochemistry at UC Berkeley in 1955, when he was in the mid30s.
Davis never taught at Berkeley but he did enough to advance medicine through his pharmaceutical research to be named Alumnus of the Year by the California Alumni Association in 2013. He celebrated this by creating an endowed fund at UC Berkeley for graduate students. That fellowship will be increased — Ann Davis’ will make sure of it.
“He cared deeply about the need for original scientific research,” his daughter said.
Frank French Davis was born July 23, 1920, in Pendleton, Ore., and grew up on a farm along the Columbia River.
In 1929, when farm prices crashed, the family farmhouse burned to the ground, allegedly in an insurance scam, and his father disappeared, leaving four children with their mother “in a shack by the side of the road,” Ann Davis said.
Davis had one set of clothes that he wore to school every day. He was teased for being the most raggedy kid in his class, but he was also the only one to earn an A in physics, his daughter said.
Upon graduation from Oregon City High School, in 1938, his mother scraped together $50 to send him to a course for airplane mechanics in Los Angeles. He was hired by Douglas Aircraft Co. and sent to North Africa to repair planes for the Allied effort. Once America entered the war, he was drafted by the Navy and served out his deployment repairing planes in both the European and Pacific theaters.
At war’s end, he found himself in Honolulu with sudden access to education that he never had before — the GI Bill. He enrolled at the University of Hawaii, earning a chemistry degree before moving to graduate school at UC Berkeley.
While in Honolulu, he met Azalea Hay, a hairdresser at the Royal Hawaiian who earned local fame when she styled Shirley Temple’s hair. They were married in 1948, and she changed her name to Kay Davis.
After earning his doctorate in biochemistry, Davis joined the faculty at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. It was in his lab at Rutgers that he developed the PEG technology, which he named for the substance polyethylene glycol. In 1979, Davis received a patent for PEGylation, which he shared with two other scientists working under him at Rutgers.
In 1989, a few years after his retirement from Rutgers, Davis moved back to the Bay Area, where there was demand for his services as a consultant to biotech firms. He and his wife settled in the hills of El Cerrito. The house was chosen because it offered a view of Wildcat Canyon, which reminded Davis of the hills near Pendleton, where he’d lived as a boy. Kay Davis died in 2009.
Last fall, Ann Davis drove up to her father’s house to inform him that his drug delivery system was being used in the COVID19 vaccine. He was watching a ballgame at the time. There were no whoops or high fives.
“My father was so modest that he just smiled and said, ‘That’s wonderful,’ ” she said, “and he went back to watching the game.”
Davis was vaccinated in March, but because of his age and infirmity, he received the oneshot Johnson & Johnson vaccine. In the end he was unable to enjoy the benefit of his invention personally.
Burial at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland will be private.
Survivors include his son, Paul Davis, of Austin, Texas; daughter, Ann Davis, of Oakland; grandsons, Kyle, Owen and Jeremy Davis; and granddaughter, Chantal Davis.
Donations in his name may be made to the Frank F. Davis Endowed Fund for Graduate Fellowships in the Biological Sciences at UC Berkeley. Mail to: Gift Services, 1995 University Ave., Suite 400, Berkeley, CA 947041070.
“His work on disguising molecules from the body’s immune system ... led to a number of lifesaving pharmaceuticals.” Robert Langer, professor of chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technolog y