The big swine flu profit

Following on from a story last week, the once presumed low-margin and risky business of vaccines production is proving to be big business for the pharmaceutical industry. The trend has today seen a further boost thanks to Swiss-giant Novartis, among others.

For instance in the US, Novartis' presence in the influenza vaccine market has increased significantly with the opening of the country's first large-scale cell-culture manufacturing plant. The Novartis plant, backed by $487 million in federal funding, represents a major milestone in using biotech production technologies to replace the 50-year-old manufacturing process based on growing vaccines in eggs, BusinessWeek reports.

According to Novartis Chairman and Chief Executive Daniel Vasella, "This technology has the potential to leapfrog the traditional egg-based approach, increasing the reliability and productivity of vaccine production."

Boost

The opening of the plant places Novartis as just one of two vaccine manufacturers using the newer cell-based methods. The firm hopes that plant will be capable of producing 50 million doses of seasonal flu vaccines and 150 million doses of pandemic vaccine for the US within six months of the declaration of a pandemic.

While Novartis has said it will be 2011 at the earliest before the factory is able to start making cell-based vaccines, any future increase in capacity is welcome news for the US. The current shortage of H1N1 vaccinations has highlighted the need for newer, more reliable vaccine development technologies. While 50 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine have been distributed to date, that's only enough to reach about one-third of the 160 million Americans that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) would like to see inoculated.

Deterrent

The complexities associated with creating new vaccines had previously deterred all but a handful of Big Pharma companies from sticking by vaccine production. Now though, firms like Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi-Aventis and, of course, Novartis might have the last laugh. With the industry now facing serious challenges to its core prescription drug business, and little in drug companies' pipelines to replace those sales, vaccines are becoming more and more important.

And if increased investment in vaccine research and development, clinical trials, and manufacturing are now key for the industry's success, Novartis and co. may well be in the driving seat.

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