New Flu Vaccine Available Soon

Some months ago the fear of bird flu affecting humans on a mass scale was extremely high. This fear put some questions in the minds of Meriden, Connecticut vaccine specialists.

One of the questions was how would the necessary amount of flu vaccine be produced quickly enough if there was a serious outbreak of the bird flu in humans. Currently flu vaccines are developed using chicken eggs and millions of chicken egg would need to be gathered to make enough vaccine in a pandemic situation. This process could be time consuming as only one flu vaccine can be made from one egg. The Meriden vaccine specialists decided to look for a faster way of producing a flu vaccine so that enough could be produced in an extreme situation.

When speaking about the problem with eggs, one researcher, Professor John Treanor said, "Eggs can be very cumbersome to work with. When you need hundreds of millions of fertilized eggs, you're dealing with a hole host of agricultural issues, as well as scientific concerns regarding the flu virus itself. Flu viruses can be temperamental, and it's not always an easy matter to get the virus to grow as you want in eggs."

It is thought by the scientific community to be of great importance to find a way to produce flu vaccine more quickly as they believe the world will definitely suffer from a flu pandemic in the future. A faster way to make the flu vaccine would be a way to save the lives of more people if this happened.

The Meridan based vaccine company has published the results or their testing today in the 'Journal of the American Medical Association' and it looks like a success.

The scientists at the University of Rochester created the new flu vaccine using insect cells. The new vaccine is created using an insect virus called baculovirus. Scientists have named the new vaccine, FluBIOk.

The new flu vaccine was tested on a group of 460 volunteers. Each person was injected with a 135 microgram dose of FluBIOk and observed to see if they contracted one of the three most threatening flu viruses at the time of the test, winter 2004-05. The results were extremely positive with none of the volunteers contracting the flu virus.

If further research satisfy scientists enough to make the vaccine universally available it would make the vaccine production process take only four months to make enough for the population of the United States. This is two months faster than the current egg method, which would take six months to make enough for the US population.

Protein Science, the Meridan based company, is now going to carry out a large scale trial of the vaccine this year. It is hoped that the new flu vaccine will be available in time for the flu season of 2008-09.

Sources
http://www.courant.com/news/health/hc-flucure0411.artapr11,0,5472978.story?coll=hc-headlines-home
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6541041.stm