Traditional flu-vaccine development involves the process of viral amplification in chicken eggs, followed by a lengthy process of inactivation, sterilization, and packaging. This method is very time consuming and does not allow rapid response to quickly evolving threats.
In the case of H5N1 bird flu, the threat is that the strain now present will mutate or recombine to form a new strain that will be easily transmissible among humans and have high mortality rates. If such a new strain appears, traditional flu-vaccine development and production will likely be too slow to ramp up to cover the world’s need.
CombiMatrix is developing a technique designed to improve the process of synthetic vaccine production by tracking the genetic fidelity of the genes encoding the vaccine in the fermentation process. Such a method would be a significant advance for large-scale synthetic production processes and could help speed FDA regulatory processes. The method is designed to be both inexpensive and fast.
CombiMatrix and Novavax are now collaborating to test efficacy of the method on Novavax’s VLP process for producing H5N1 bird-flu vaccine.
“CombiMatrix’s belief is that, for a variety of reasons, the world needs the ability to design new vaccines and to produce them much more rapidly than it can today,” said Dr Amit Kumar, president and CEO of CombiMatrix. “Reasons include the possibility of rapidly evolving natural threats such as bird flu and SARS as well as increased terrorist activity throughout the world.”