NIH Awards Grant For Development Of Insect Cell-Based Flu Vaccine
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $220,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to the University of Wyoming spin-out business GlycoBac. The grant will support the development of a manufacturing process of influenza vaccine production.
Presently, nearly all flu vaccines are manufactured in chicken eggs, a costly procedure both in resources and time. Flu virus is injected into fertilized chicken eggs. After replication, virus particles are purified, killed, and formulated into a vaccine. This process has gone on for half a century, says Christoph Geisler, GlycoBac’s chief research scientist. “The egg-based flu vaccine production method has a few drawbacks. Most significant, it takes a whole lot of eggs, and a long time to make enough flu vaccine. The whole process takes six to nine months.”
GlycoBac will use the six-month NIH grant to improve its flu vaccines created in insect cells taken from a moth called the fall army worm. The company’s procedure can be accomplished within weeks, which is of particular importance in the case of a pandemic outbreak.
While the company’s method is faster, the insect cell product is less effective and needs about three times the dose. “Recent studies show this may be caused by differences between the sugar structures found on the egg-made vaccine versus the insect cell product. Our goal is to make an influenza virus vaccine with egg-type sugar structures in insect cells. The result would be a more effective vaccine – the same amount of vaccine could protect more people. It would be cheaper per dose, too,” Geisler said. Using a bioreactor to produce large amounts of the vaccine, similar to a beer brewery, might help in simplifying the process.
The project entitled “Glycoengineered Baculoviruses for the Production of More Efficacious Influenza Vaccines” is set to begin next month. Research will be conducted on-campus.