WASHINGTON, May 4 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government on Thursday awarded five pharmaceutical companies more than one billion dollars in contracts to develop and produce new influenza vaccines in the United States.
According to a statement issued by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, the contracts support the advanced development of cell-based production technologies for influenza vaccines and will help to modernize and strengthen the nation's influenza vaccine production by creating an alternative to producing influenza vaccines in eggs.
"Today, we're taking a step closer to preparedness by investing more than $1 billion to develop vaccines more quickly and to produce them here in the United States," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said.
"We have the opportunity to be the first generation that prepares for pandemic. Our current capacity of egg-based influenza vaccine production is not sufficient to meet increased demands during an emergency. Accelerating the development of this vaccine technology and creating domestic capacity are critical to our preparedness efforts," he added.
Cell-based vaccine manufacturing, a technology that is used in many other modern vaccines, holds the promise of a reliable, flexible and scalable method of producing influenza vaccines. Currently licensed influenza vaccines are produced in specialized chicken eggs in a technique that has changed little in over 50 years.
Using a cell culture approach to producing influenza vaccine offers a number of benefits. Vaccine manufacturers are able to bypass the steps needed to adapt the virus strains to grow in eggs. In addition, cell culture-based influenza vaccines will help meet surge capacity needs in the event of a shortage or pandemic, since cells may be frozen in advance and large volumes grown quickly, the Health Department said.
The companies receiving the contracts were: GlaxoSmithKline, MedImmune, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, DynPort Vaccine and Solvay Pharmaceuticals. Enditem
