Iomai founder inspired by work at Walter Reed

‘‘When you vaccinate children, you make them whole,” he said.

The cornerstone of Iomai is Glenn’s 1998 paper in the scientific journal Nature in which he and colleagues at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., proposed that needle-free skin immunization ‘‘would greatly increase the ease of vaccination.”

‘‘Walter Reed was a good place because they dealt with exotic problems,” he said. ‘‘They are trying to come up with therapies that protect troops and our group was looking at novel ways to deliver vaccines.”

It took him three years to get the paper published, he said, and begin Iomai’s 10-year odyssey into patch vaccine technology. ‘‘Well, I’m just a figurehead here,” he said, ‘‘There are a lot of hands on the oars.”

When asked where he is from, Glenn replied: ‘‘all over, really.”

His father worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Glenn grew up near tracking stations in Pasadena, Calif.; Canberra, Australia; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Madrid, Spain.

‘‘We moved a lot,” Glenn said. ‘‘JPL was given the mission to find life in the universe, with minimal tools and did these incredible things.”

On a military scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., Glenn learned soccer from his college buddies. He said he was shocked to make the school team and even more surprised to make a professional team after an open tryout.

He played with the California Sunshine team of the American Soccer League right after college because, he said, learning soccer took far less time than learning to make patch vaccines.

After teaching secondary school and coaching women’s soccer at Whitman, Glenn found his niche in medical science. In exchange for his scholarship, he owed the Army service, and he studied medicine while in the Army. He practiced pediatrics in Germany in the U.S. health care system in Europe.

While practicing at the Pediatric Immunization Clinic, 34th General Hospital in Augsburg, Germany, he was highly impressed by the impact of a new vaccine on infants.

‘‘I saw the Haemophilus confluence B vaccine come in, by John Robbins group at NIH. It had a huge impact on a type of meningitis disease, where you would see an 18-month-old baby one day with a fever and the next day he would be dead. The disease just went away in the late ’80s,” Glenn said.

‘‘That was so exciting that I wished I could do something like that.”

Glenn still plays soccer on Iomai’s team at the Rockville indoor soccer complex. He lives with his wife and children in Poolesville.