GE and Novavax to offer ready-to-go pandemic cell-culture flu vaccine
GE Healthcare and US-based Novavax have announced a partnership designed to offer governments a ready-to-go package of technology, allowing them to produce cell-culture based pandemic flu vaccine.
GE Healthcare and US-based Novavax have announced a partnership designed to offer governments a ready-to-go package of technology, allowing them to produce cell-culture based pandemic flu vaccine.
Under the arrangement the partners would market a combination of GE Healthcare's bioprocess technology and design expertise as well as Novavax's virus-like particle and manufacturing platform. Financial details of the partnership were not released.
GE Healthcare said the company was not certain when it would be in a position to market the product fully and would not say which countries in particular the partnership was set to target. Contracts would be tailored to individual clients, and although the contracts envisaged would be technology based, GE could consider one involving the construction of a vaccines plant.
Global demand for pandemic influenza vaccine has been reported as possibly approaching 13 billion doses, with current world capacity at best being 2.4 billion doses. The product offered by GE Healthcare and Novavax was aimed at enabling vaccine production facility commissioning in half the time of a traditional egg-based facility. And, once established, such a vaccine facility could allow manufacturing of pandemic flu vaccine to commence within 12 weeks of the strain isolation.
From commissioning a new facility to production would be approximately two-and-a-half years, half the time for a traditional egg-based vaccine production facility, and at a potential capital reduction of approximately 60%, the partners said.
Novavax's VLP-based H5N1 pandemic flu vaccine is currently in Phase I/IIa clinical trials. The goal is that any required recombinant vaccine could be produced in cell culture within 12 weeks of identification of a pandemic strain, without using eggs or live influenza virus - about half the time of currently available processes.
