Contracts worth £33m for H5N1 vaccine awarded
R.Maisonneuve, Publiphoto Diffusion/Science Photo Library
Traditional vaccine production uses one hen’s egg per dose |
Contracts worth £33m to make 3.5 million doses of H5N1 influenza vaccine have been awarded by the Department of Health to Baxter and Chiron. Baxter is to prepare two million doses.
The vaccine, scheduled for delivery in two instalments in May and October
this year, is to be used for research and to vaccinate frontline health
care workers if pandemic flu based on the H5N1 avian influenza virus
breaks out. It is hoped that this will provide a buffer while a specific
vaccine is produced.
Baxter and Chiron were selected out of the five companies that tendered
for the
contract.
The contract is additional to the sleeping contracts that have already
been placed for 120 million doses of specific pandemic flu vaccine once
the strain is identified.
Health minister Rosie Winterton said: “We take the potential threat
posed by pandemic flu very seriously and, as the World Health Organization
and a recent Lords Science and Technology Committee have recognised,
the UK is among the best prepared countries in the world.”
Baxter is also working with the US National Institutes of Health on the
development of cell culture-based H5N1 candidate pandemic flu vaccine.
This would make vaccine production independent of the availability of
hen’s eggs. Traditional production methods require one hen’s
egg for each dose prepared. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
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