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U.S.
awards $1 billion in flu vaccine contracts
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Five companies won more than $1 billion in contracts to develop better influenza vaccines, and to make them largely on U.S. territory, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department said on Thursday. GlaxoSmithKline Plc was awarded $274.75 million, MedImmune Inc. was awarded $169.46 million, Novartis AG won $220.51 million, Computer Sciences Corp. unit DynPort Vaccine Co., working with Baxter International Inc., won $40.97 million and Solvay Pharmaceuticals won $298.59 million. The companies will work to develop cell based-vaccines against seasonal influenza or a pandemic strain. The new vaccines will be grown in labs in batches of cells called cell cultures, HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said. The new method aims to replace older systems that require steady supplies of carefully grown eggs and months of cultivation. The target is both the annual seasonal flu, and the H5N1 strain spreading among birds. The H5N1 strain does not easily infect humans, but it has killed more than 100 people. Experts fear it could mutate into a form that could spread easily and quickly among people. If it did, it would spark a pandemic and a rush to make a vaccine to fight it. Leavitt said the goal is to have vaccine for every American six months after a pandemic is declared. |
"Cell-based vaccine production is more reliable. It's also more flexible and more scalable than traditional egg-based vaccines," Leavitt said. Experts have urged the United States for years to help companies modernize influenza vaccine production. The current, 40-year-old technology is unwieldy and unreliable, and it takes months to tell how many doses will be ready in a given year. HHS also has worried that almost all flu vaccines are made outside the United States. If countries kept vaccine supplies for their own citizens during a pandemic, vaccines might not be available for Americans. Glaxo, MedImmune, Solvay and Novartis said the HHS funding would help them build or expand manufacturing capacity in the United States. Baxter said its contract with DynPort covered production of batches of seasonal or pandemic flu vaccines at a plant in the Czech Republic. Baxter said it would provide doses of a potential pandemic vaccine to the U.S. National Institutes of Health for human testing expected to start this year. HHS spokeswoman Christina Pearson said each contract was intended to build domestic capacity for vaccine production, even if some early work was done overseas. Maryland-based MedImmune, which makes a needle-free, nasal-spray vaccine, plans to launch a study in |
June testing if its technology works on a potential pandemic strain, Chief Executive David Mott said. "We plan to expand our domestic manufacturing capacity by establishing a cell-based facility in the United States that can produce at least 150 million doses within six months of notification of an influenza pandemic," he added. Last year, HHS awarded Sanofi Pasteur a $97 million contract for development of a cell-based vaccine. Leavitt said he had not yet granted liability protection to the manufacturers but he said it was likely to happen. A watchdog group criticized Republican lawmakers for giving the secretary the power to grant that immunity. Public Citizen's Congress Watch said in a report that newly obtained e-mails from the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) showed the industry was heavily consulted in crafting legislation to allow for liability protection. "The lobbyists were totally integrated with the legislative process," Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook said, adding it was a "totally egregious example" of industry power over lawmakers. BIO representatives had no immediate comment.
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