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US Company Develops First Batch Of Swine Flu Vaccine
"We turned out our first batch of doses, about 100,000, against (A)H1N1 flu last week and we're continuing to manufacture it," Adams, chief executive officer of Connecticut-based Protein Sciences Corporation, told AFP.
The US Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday announced that it has awarded a 35-million-dollar contract to Protein Sciences, which could be extended for another five years to reach 147 million dollars.
The insect cell technology "has advanced in recent years to a point that we believe it could help meet a surge in demand for US-based vaccine for seasonal and pandemic flu," Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.
A(H1N1), or swine flu, which emerged in Mexico in April, has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, killing 231 people worldwide and infecting more than 52,000 people in 100 countries.
As the novel strain of swine flu spread, scientists around the world scrambled to develop a seed strain, a necessary first step in developing a vaccine using either chicken eggs or mammalian cells, the way most vaccines are produced.
They warned that the virus could mutate during the southern hemisphere's flu season before returning north in a more lethal form in autumn, in a pattern similar to that seen in the deadly 1918 flu pandemic, which claimed an estimated 20 to 50 million lives around the globe.
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