Used with permission of Novartis Vaccines, June 2007. © Novartis Vaccines, click to enlarge
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss drugs manufacturer Novartis announced 12 June that it had successfully produced an antivirus effective against the wild type of A/H1N1 swine flu virus that is at pandemic levels using new cell-based technology.
The news comes hot on the heels of the widely expected World Health Organization’s (WHO) announcement 11 June of a phase six pandemic, the highest level. The drugs maker says that its cell-based production technology will allow it to produce vaccines much more quickly than by using the traditional method of adapting the virus strain to grow in eggs. It has a production facility in Marburg, Germany that can produce millions of doses a week.
Following further testing and clinical trials on the “wild strain” antivirus, Novartis hopes to be able to produce, test and deploy an antivirus for the reassortant A/H1N1 strain provided by the US Centers for Disease Control by this autumn.
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 12 June 2009.
Filed under: Health
Tags: A/H1N1, Marburg Germany, Novartis, pandemic, WHO
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July 23rd, 2009 at 8:03 am
[...] an A/H1N1 vaccine. Human clinical trials are an important step in the approvals process. BBC, CNN, GenevaLunch Posted by :: Sean Ecker on 23 July [...]