US gives $1bn bird flu vaccine contracts to 5 firms
WASHINGTON, May 4: The United States stepped up its guard against a bird flu pandemic on Thursday by awarding one billion dollars worth of contracts to five drug companies to develop an influenza vaccine.
The five-year contracts were given to Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline, MedImmune, Swiss firm Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, DynPort Vaccine Co and Solvay Pharmaceuticals of Belgium.
The announcement came a day after the White House released an action plan to counter any avian flu pandemic, amid fears that an outbreak could kill as many as two million Americans and cause economic havoc.
“We have the opportunity to be the first generation that prepares for pandemic,” Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Mike Leavitt said in a statement.
“Today, we’re taking a step closer to preparedness by investing more than one billion dollars to develop vaccines more quickly and to produce them here in the United States,” he said.
Experts say manufacturing a vaccine would take months, but they hope anti-viral drugs, together with measures such as school closures and travel bans, may stop or slow the spread of an outbreak.
The anti-viral drug Tamiflu, produced by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, remains the frontline treatment against bird flu in humans.
The five firms either have or are planning US production facilities, having been tasked by the HHS with producing 150 million doses each within six months of the declaration of a pandemic so that every American can be vaccinated.
Leavitt said that stepping up the pace of both development and production of vaccines was “critical” to curbing an outbreak.
The five contracts come to 1.004 billion dollars in total, part of a 3.3-billion-dollar package given to the HHS Department by Congress this year to help the United States prepare for a mass outbreak.
The awards broke down as follows: Solvay Pharmaceuticals, 298.59 million; GlaxoSmithKline, 274.75 million dollars; Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, 220.51 million; MedImmune, 169.46 million; and DynPort Vaccine, 40.97 million.
Solvay Pharmaceuticals, whose US operations are based at Marietta, Georgia, said it would build a new US facility, after recently opening a commercial-scale flu vaccine manufacturing site in The Netherlands.
GlaxoSmithKline said it would invest more than 100 million dollars at its vaccine facility in Marietta, Pennsylvania.
The five companies were asked to come up with a flu vaccine from cell cultures, rather than one made in specialized chicken eggs — a technique that the HHS said has changed little in over 50 years.
“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,” the department said.
In April last year, the HHS awarded Sanofi Pasteur a 97-million-dollar contract to make a cell-based flu vaccine. That was the first federal US contract for commercial production using newer flu vaccine technologies.
Developing improved vaccines and enhancing production capacity were top objectives laid out in President George W. Bush’s “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” released Wednesday.
The 240-page plan outlines various measures to isolate Americans stricken by the H5N1 bird flu virus and to slow its spread. The virus has yet to be detected in North America, but officials fear it is only a matter of time before it crosses the Atlantic after spreading from Asia to Africa and Europe.—AFP
