May 5, 2006 -- HHS Funds Push for Cell-Based Influenza Vaccine

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced yesterday that it has awarded more than a billion dollars in grants to five pharmaceutical companies to speed up development of a cell-based influenza vaccine. The technique of manufacturing vaccines in a cell culture is already used to make a number of vaccines, but so far flu vaccine has been produced by cultivating the virus in specialized chicken eggs, a process that would be too slow to assure a supply of vaccine in the case of a flu pandemic, HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said. In the cell-based process, the virus grows in large tanks containing cells that float in a nutrient broth, a process sometimes likened to brewing beer. The five new grants are in addition to $97 million the HHS awarded in April 2005 to the pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur to develop the cell-based method. The companies named as grantees yesterday are GlaxoSmithKline, MedImmune (the company currently makes the nasal flu vaccine FluMist), Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, DynPort Vaccine, and Solvay Pharmaceuticals. Together, if all goes well, the companies, most of which do their manufacturing in countries other than the United States, may be able to make some 300 million doses of vaccine in a timeframe of six months--which would be enough to immunize every U.S. resident. The grants awarded yesterday, however, do not actually buy any vaccine and are intended simply to accelerate the development of the new manufacturing techniques.