Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

With egg on its face, US looks to abandon egg-based vaccine manufacturing

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Let’s do away with eggs. No, that’s not the public outcry from the salmonella outbreak terrifying omelet-lovers. It’s one of the ideas offered in a new strategy rolled out by the US government yesterday for how to deal with public health emergencies. The strategy includes plans for a $200 million bioterrorism and pandemic defense fund and a $1 billion a year kitty for upgrading the country’s vaccine manufacturing capabilities. (More on the egg bashing later.)

The recommendations come after the pandemic H1N1 swine flu virus claimed around 13,000 American lives, including a disproportionate number of children compared with seasonal influenza outbreaks. One of the problems with the US response to the H1N1 crisis, many critics argue, was that an appropriate vaccine was not manufactured, tested and rolled out fast enough to reach the millions of people who needed it.

“Our nation must have a system that is nimble and flexible enough to produce medical countermeasures quickly in the face of any attack or threat, whether it’s a threat we know about today or a new one,” Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement.

To improve the country’s preparedness, both of yesterday’s reports — one from HHS officials and another from a panel of scientists and technology industry executives convened by the Office of Science and Technology Policy — urged health officials to move away from slow egg-based vaccine manufacturing to faster alternatives.


The biggest winners from this shift could be small biotech companies, noted Reuters. For example, Maryland-based Novavax uses virus-like particles to make vaccine, Pennsylvania-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals is testing a DNA-based approach and Connecticut-based Protein Sciences Corp. has a vaccine in its pipeline grown in caterpillar ovary cells.

With close to half a billion dollars already invested by the government in Novartis’s North Carolina facility, the Swiss drug maker could also come out on top.

The government’s new plans also call for strengthening regulatory science at the Food and Drug Administration, developing new teams at the National Institutes of Health focused on translational vaccine research and a fund to invest in private sector research and manufacturing.

Image by TheGiantVermin via Flickr Creative Commons

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