Future of Vaccine Production

Heard this NPR story while getting my vehicle emissions test today. They don't have a transcript yet, but it basically shows how slow and inefficient current vaccine production with embryonated chicken eggs is. One tidbit I got is that one opts for the nasal vaccine and not the shot, you use only 1/100th of an egg as oppose to a full chicken abortion.

The hope is that they are starting to use animal cell lines, which while they may have originally come from an animal have long since stopped harming that particular animal. They mentioned a canine kidney cell line, as opposed to Vero cells (mentioned often on this site) as being a much better system for viral production.

Then they went a step further, and bring up a new caterpillar-derived system for making viral proteins for a vaccine. This was new to me. I was worried at first, because cell-free protein synthesis using wheat germ or rabbit reticulocytes ends up killing the heat or rabbit.

After some digging, I found that the system uses a cell line (and not fresh animals for each batch) from a moth, the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda) with help from Baculovirus. Exciting stuff.

Further reading:
1) Maiorella, B., Inlow, D., Shauger, A., & Harano, D. (1988). Large-Scale Insect Cell-Culture for Recombinant Protein Production. Nature Biotechnology. 6:1406-1410.

2) Ikonomoi, L., Schneider, Y.-J., Agathos, S. N. (July 2003). Insect cell culture for industrial production of recombinant proteins. Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology. 62(1):1-20.



Post Scriptum:
This post has been mentioned here. Thanks Mr. Dandelion!

Eggless Swine Flu Vaccines coming to Europe

This is an update on a story being followed here. I was perusing the Baxter website for news, and found this out-of-date update. Deciding to do some minor journalism, I emailed them, and just got a reply from Karoline Traschler, Project Marketing Manager for Global Marketing Vaccines:

We thank you for your interest in our H1N1 vaccine. We expect European licensure by end of September. We have to inform you that it will not be available on the US market.

The last sentence is of concern, being stateside and all. I replied asking for clarification, but I'd imagine it'd have to do with the stricter drug safety regulations here (thanks a lot, thalidamide!). I'll keep you posted.