THE AGE - 20th May 2008Drug giant beats the rest to a bird flu...

THE AGE - 20th May 2008

Drug giant beats the rest to a bird flu vaccine



A BIG drug company has became the first to win marketing approval for a vaccine to tackle bird flu.

GlaxoSmithKline, which is the world's second-biggest drugs group, said the European Commission had approved its vaccine, Prepandrix, in all 27 member states.

GSK said its vaccine had the advantage of allowing governments to begin inoculating their population before a pandemic.

The vaccine uses the current H5N1 influenza virus, which scientists believe could jump from birds to humans in a form that is highly infectious, triggering a flu pandemic that could kill tens of millions of people.

The company said its vaccine was flexible and would be effective if the virus mutated slightly. Most other flu vaccines under development would need to be altered after a new strain of the virus emerges, which could take four to six months.

Health officials have warned that the risk of a human influenza pandemic is probably growing as the H5N1 virus becomes more entrenched in poultry in Asia, Africa and parts of Europe.

There have been 382 human cases of bird flu worldwide since 2003, 241 of them fatal, according to the World Health Organisation.

GSK is betting that the next pandemic flu virus will be a variant of the H5N1 virus.

If a future flu pandemic has mutated too far away from the H5N1 virus into a totally new form, then GSK's vaccine will not be effective, and a new vaccine will have to be made.

GSK chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier, who retires tomorrow, said: "For the first time, the authorities are approving a pre-pandemic vaccine. We have demonstrated that even if the H5N1 virus drifts to a different strain it is still effective."

He said that if governments primed the population by giving them a pandemic vaccine, it would boost their immune system. "It's like training for the Olympics. It doesn't mean you're going to win the gold medal, but if you train you'll be a much better system."

GSK has donated 50-millimetre doses of its influenza vaccine to the World Health Organisation, and sold versions of it to the governments of the US, Switzerland and Finland.

GSK's bird flu vaccine, which has completed clinical trials, blends small doses of existing H5N1 strains from Vietnam and Indonesia to teach the human immune system to recognise the virus and help it fight off mutations.

GUARDIAN