Vical Incorporated (Nasdaq:VICL) announced today that the company’s DNA vaccine against A/H1N1 pandemic influenza (swine flu) has demonstrated robust immune responses in 100% of vaccinated animals against virus strains isolated from recent outbreaks in three distinct geographic locations — California, Texas and Mexico.
The Australian Infection Control Association this week warned the government against proceeding with the programme, saying that the planned use of multidose vials (used to vaccinate several people) posed a “significant potential risk to patient safety.” The association’s president, Claire Boardman, said that use of multidose vials would contravene national infection control guidelines (www.safetyandquality.gov.au/internet/safety/publishing.nsf/Content/02A94EEE98D72244CA25740F00251B98/$File/NationalInfectionControlGuidelines.pdf) and that numerous adverse events related to their use had been well documented.
MedImmune is putting its FluMist nasal spray technology to the test against swine flu. FluMist, which got off to a shaky start in the U.S., brought in only $104 million last year, a fraction of what the big global manufacturers have been able to earn with their flu shots. But all those naysayers who scorned the terms of the MedImmune buyout in the face of such weak performance could well be silenced by the rewards available when a pandemic hits. AstraZeneca plans to make 200 million doses of swine flu vaccine by next spring.
The less a person slept, the more likely he or she was to develop a cold (there was a graded association between infection rate and average sleep duration). Participants who slept fewer than 7 hours were 2.94 times more likely to develop a cold than those who had 8 hours or more sleep. “When the components of clinical illness (infection and signs or symptoms) were examined separately, sleep efficiency but not sleep duration was associated with signs and symptoms of illness,” they wrote, but “neither was associated with infection.”
Fears about swine flu have spurred more than 3,000 people so far to volunteer to take part in upcoming clinical trials of a new vaccine. That’s already more than the number scientists will need at eight different sites around the U.S. “We don’t generally ever get a response like this,” Dr. Lisa Jackson, the principal researcher in charge of the clinical trials being readied at Seattle-based Group Health Cooperative, which fielded more than a thousand calls from people in two days.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she is urging school superintendents around the country to spend the summer preparing for the possibility of turning schools into swine flu vaccine clinics this fall. “If you think about vaccinating kids, schools are the logical place,”
Analysts note that the pandemic couldn’t have come at a better time for Glaxo, one of the world’s largest vaccine makers. Generics have been steadily eating into the company’s margins, leaving Glaxo looking for new products to make up the shortfall.
Faced with the first World Health Organization (WHO) declared pandemic in four decades, health officials arou world are rushing to order huge stock-piles of the H1N1 (Swine) Fl vaccine in what is shaping up as a multibillion-dollar windfall for the world’s biggest manufacturers.
Novartis is one of five big manufacturers preparing swine flu vaccines for the U.S. market, a CDC official says. Dr. Pascale Wortley, the CDC’s pandemic-vaccine coordinator, says that by October the U.S. expects to have between 40 million and 160 million doses of vaccine ready for use. That could mean that this fall, U.S. school children may be expected to get a seasonal flu shot as well as a double dose of swine flu vaccine.
Health ministers in the UK say that they aren’t waiting to see if the WHO will declare a level six pandemic alert. They’re ready to order enough swine flu vaccine for the entire population. Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon said that she’s already in discussions with manufacturers to ink contracts for delivery–once a new vaccine is ready. Advance pandemic vaccine supply contracts are already in place, but are triggered only after the WHO declares a Phase 6 pandemic.
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