Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum

Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum is a Congolese microbiologist who serves as the general director of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB). He was part of the team at the Yambuku Catholic Mission Hospital that looked into the first Ebola outbreak and helped identify Ebola as a new disease. In 2016, he led research at the INRB, working with scientists from the U.S. National Institute of Health Vaccine Research Center, to develop mAb114, one of the most effective treatments for Ebola. This treatment was tested successfully during later outbreaks in the DRC after the country’s health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga, authorized its use against the World Health Organization’s advice.

Muyembe grew up in Bandundu Province, the child of farmers, and attended schools run by the Catholic Jesuit order. He began studying medicine in 1962 at Lovanium University in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), graduating in 1969, where he developed an interest in microbiology. He earned a PhD in virology from the University of Leuven in Belgium, researching viral infections using mouse models. He returned to Zaire (another former name for the DRC) in 1973 and worked on cholera outbreak control, starting with a 1974 outbreak in Matadi.

The Lancet has called Muyembe Africa’s Ebola hunter. He first encountered the Ebola virus in 1976 at a Belgian hospital in Yambuku, where he took liver biopsies from three deceased nuns, though the results were inconclusive. He was the first scientist to survive direct contact with the virus. He is considered one of the discoverers of Ebola because of his work during that outbreak. He took blood from a sick nurse, which was sent to the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp and then to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where Peter Piot used the sample to identify Ebola. This account of his role was later challenged in a 2016 scientific article he co-signed with other survivors of the first epidemic.

In 1978, he became dean of the University of Kinshasa Medical School. In 1981, he joined the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal, working with the CDC to study Ebola and Marburg viruses. He was appointed director of the DRC’s National Institute for Biomedical Research in 1998. He has served as an adviser to the WHO Emergency Committee on Ebola, leading 15 researchers studying sleeping sickness, Bas-Congo virus, and Ebola. He has also advised political leaders in West Africa.

Muyembe recognized the sociocultural challenges of Ebola, pushing hospitals to improve infection control and community engagement. During the 1995 Ebola outbreak, he worked with David L. Heymann after the director of Kikwit General Hospital called for help with a deadly diarrhea outbreak. Muyembe identified it as Ebola and sent samples to the CDC for confirmation. He has chaired international committees controlling Ebola outbreaks in Gabon and the DRC, and leads research into Ebola’s animal reservoirs. In 2009, he showed that Ebola outbreaks in the DRC were linked to fruit bat exposure. He developed an anti-Ebola serum therapy using antibodies from recovered patients, a method first tried during the 1976 Yambuku outbreak and later recommended by the DRC government’s International Commission.

In 2014, WHO Director General Margaret Chan appointed him to the Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response, co-chaired by Sam Zaramba and David L. Heymann. During a 2018 outbreak, delays in reporting slowed control efforts, and the Wellcome Trust and the UK’s Department for International Development each donated £1 million. Muyembe pioneered the use of an experimental Ebola vaccine to limit the virus’s spread, including vaccinating health workers. This stance on experimental drugs sparked debate in the DRC, and Health Minister Oly Ilunga eventually resigned, citing pressure from unnamed multinational pharmaceutical firms.

Muyembe has established several research facilities, including labs for polio and influenza. In 2017, he partnered with the Japan International Cooperation Agency to build a research complex with multiple biosafety labs. As of 2018, the DRC had no labs capable of testing for Ebola. He is a globally recognized leader in the fight against Ebola and a key figure in WHO efforts against infectious diseases. He is a co-discoverer of the Ebola virus in 1976 and co-inventor of the monoclonal antibody mAb114, which the FDA approved as an Ebola treatment under the name Ebanga in December 2020.

On April 3, 2020, during a press conference in Kinshasa, Muyembe advocated for testing experimental COVID-19 vaccines in the DRC amid the pandemic, sparking serious backlash from the Congolese public. He later backtracked, saying there had been a misunderstanding.

In 2015, he received the Christophe Mérieux Prize for further research in the Congo Basin, and the Royal Society Africa Prize for his foundational work on viral hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, which shaped understanding of their epidemiology, clinical features, and outbreak control.