If a strain of avian H5N1 influenza that readily spread from person to person were to appear in the real world, the great fear is that it would produce a deadly pandemic to dwarf what happened in 1918.
The best defense against flu pandemics are vaccines, and the most recent experience with a global flu pandemic, in 2009, highlighted the gaps that existed in getting vaccine quickly made in large amounts. Three years ago, despite the U.S. government marshaling all its infectious disease-fighting muscle, the effort wound up delivering most of the vaccine too late to matter. The pandemic peaked in October 2009, while the vaccine supply didn’t hit its stride until sometime in December.
Courtesy Novartis
Novartis influenza-vaccine plant in Holly Springs, N.C.
In a report published today in Science as part of its H5N1 flu package, Dr. Rino Rappuoli, head of vaccines research for Novartis, spelled out seven steps that could hasten vaccine production for a newly appearing pandemic flu. The two most novel moves involve having vaccine manufacturers prepare in advance synthetic “vaccine seed” viruses and also adopting new ways to quantify viral antigens, a process that alone took about 2 months in 2009, he said. Adopting these two technological innovations could transform the vaccine-producing process “from a mid-20th century system … into a 21st century system of instantaneous electronic information exchange followed by immediate production.”
The modernized system would mean sequencing a newly isolated pandemic virus in the field and then — instead of shipping the virus — just sending gene sequences, followed by replicating the hemagglutinin gene at a remote site, putting the new gene into a waiting scaffold vaccine virus, and launching vaccine production.
If these two changes had been in place in 2009, “the vaccine would have been available in large quantities before the peak of viral infection,” Dr. Rappuoli said in his paper.
More importantly, speaking at a June 20 press conference Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the National Institutes of Health, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, had already begun to move on this, adopting “the fundamental principles of bringing influenza vaccinology into the 21st century.” Steps already taken along the lines of what Dr. Rappuoli suggested carry the potential for “a significant change right now” in the time needed to get out a pandemic vaccine, Dr. Fauci said.
He particularly cited NIH studies underway using an immunoadjuvant to expand the coverage potential of stockpiled H5N1 vaccine, a step that would “markedly accelerate availability.
“We are right now in a much better position [to distribute pandemic vaccine quickly] than we were in 2009 when we had vaccine available only after the peak of the H1N1 pandemic,” Dr. Fauci said.
—Mitchel Zoler (on Twitter @mitchelzoler)