Relieving the swine strain

Thanks to the last five years of planning for an influenza pandemic, the U.S. is on track to be thoroughly prepared by 2012 for an outbreak of highly virulent, easily transmitted avian influenza (H5N1). The question is what to do in the meantime. Thus discussion at last week's meeting of FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee centered on how to meet anticipated demand for a swine influenza A (H1N1) vaccine now, when the planned infrastructure is only partially in place.

If all goes according to plan, by 2012 there will be domestic capacity to rapidly produce hundreds of millions of doses of flu vaccine at a newly licensed cell culture facility; studies will have determined whether off-the-shelf adjuvants can be used to boost immunogenicity, stretching capacity to billions of doses; and a robust surveillance system will be in place to monitor safety...