Novartis cut the ribbon on its first US flu vaccine plant yesterday. The bioreactors are still empty at the Holly Springs, North Carolina, facility, but the company eventually hopes to crank out flu vaccines made from cell cultures instead of chicken eggs.
The new plant will do little to bolster the country’s limited supply of shots against the H1N1 swine flu this year. Even so, Novartis is confident that the cell-based technology will scale up manufacturing more quickly, which will allow the company to pump out large batches of vaccine when the next pandemic ultimately strikes.
The US government is clearly banking on the approach. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) invested $487 million to help Novartis build the plant, which should be in production in 2011 and running at full tilt two years later, according to a Novartis press release.
Novartis’ new plant, which plans to grow flu viruses in vats of cells taken from dog kidneys, is not the only incubator of a cell-culture approach. Meriden, Connecticut-based Protein Sciences Corp. is developing a vaccine made by inserting flu genes into an insect virus that is then grown in caterpillar ovary cells. Last week, a US Food and Drug Administration advisory panel narrowly rejected the company’s application, citing safety concerns.
The HHS also doled out handsome grants to the UK’s GlaxoSmithKline and France’s Sanofi-Aventis to develop cell-based flu vaccines. GSK, however, says that the technology is a decade away from usefulness, while Sanofi maintains that the slight reduction in production time is not worth the extra cost of manufacturing. (Wall Street Journal)
It looks like we should keep counting those chickens while they hatch out our flu jabs. But if you want to hear more about the alternatives, listen to an NPR interview with Robert Belshe, director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Saint Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri, who explains the canine and caterpillar counter-options.
Image: Flickr/alvi2047 via Creative Commons