bdm deal with cdc on h5n1 bird flu, page-13

re: bdm deal with cdc on h5n1 bird flu shaolintrad You are right, we need multiple layers of defense and vaccines are, of course, part of that. I wish you all the best. There is always a lot of uncertainty about new drugs and vaccines, a promising candidate may fail in clinical trials or else have major safety issues. I cannot count how many HIV vaccine candidates there have been that have failed at some stage in the process.

Biota's HRV and HepC programs are at the stage where they are promising, but they could certainly fail at some stage in the process, or a competing drug candidate from another company comes to dominate with outstanding effectiveness. The fact that Medimmune is backing Biota's anti RSV compound to the tune of over 100 million dollars makes me think that this is a better than usual drug candidate.

The biggest advantage for Biota is that they have a major product on the market, right now, (zanamivir: Relenza) with unprecedented demand and limited supply and the royalty stream is really coming in now. They just about broke even in the last 6 months. The best is yet to come.

Then we have LANI, which has the advantage of being a very small modification of zanamivir which means that it is almost certain to pass the safety and efficacy hurdles required to get it to a very big market, and soon.

There are countless companies working on a bird flu vaccine. Probably only one or two will get to market. A lot of competition in the field.

As influenza is such a "shape shifter" it is incredibly hard to make a pandemic protection vaccine that will protect us from any and all influenza threats that may come our way. We may be forced to rely mainly on antivirals (as we do with HIV) for the forseeable future. And there is no other antiviral even close to LANI in terms of: time to market; practicality for mass distribution and use; efficacy; cost; long term storage for pandemic preparedness.

Peramivir is a realistic competitor to IV Relenza, but Relenza has a definite head start.