Re: Farmas USA
Sacado de los comentarios de Nasdaqlandia:
New technologies do allow experimental vaccines to be developed quickly, although those vaccines still require testing. In March 2013, the first cases of people being infected by the avian flu H7N9 were identified in China. Ten days after the Chinese government announced the outbreak, the biopharmaceutical company Novavax—which was already working under a contract with the U.S. government to develop a vaccine against the H5N1 bird flu—received the genetic sequence of the virus and began developing a vaccine. Just six months after the H7N9 virus was sequenced, Novavax’s experimental vaccine was tested in humans with positive results. The company continues to develop the product with U.S. government support, although it must still go through lengthy testing.
The approach used by Novavax shows how rapidly a vaccine can emerge from the lab bench. Instead of copying viral DNA using bacteria, which requires acquiring a copy of the virus’s genome, a potentially time-consuming process, the company had the DNA synthesized chemically, then used cultured insect cells to produce bits of protein from that DNA. The protein bits were combined into a virus-sized nanoparticle that was used as the vaccine (see “Delivering a Virus Imposter Quicker”).
Despite a lack of market incentives for now, a few companies are trying to develop vaccines against MERS. Among them are Novavax, which is using the same methods employed for its H7N9 vaccine. But these companies face a unique technical challenge: for some unknown reason, no small lab animals can be infected by MERS.
And so, while researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine reported last month that Novavax’s vaccine can generate anti-MERS antibodies in mice, they could not show whether that immune response actually protected the animals against any disease. The next step will be finding a suitable animal for testing, perhaps a non-human primate or a mouse that has been genetically altered to be susceptible.
