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‘Hilton’ Chickens Are Essential to Stave Off Pandemic (Update1)
By Simeon Bennett and Kanoko Matsuyama
May 13 (Bloomberg) -- Workers at Kinross Farm defended its hens against the worst wildfires in Australian history while their own homes burned. Now the birds may return the favor by protecting humans from swine flu.
The hens, housed in air-conditioned sheds and kept in shape with a vitamin-rich diet, blood tests and doctors’ visits, lay eggs critical to the creation of a new vaccine. It’s needed to foil the flu virus that may prompt the World Health Organization to declare the first pandemic since 1968.
Seasonal flu causes 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year globally, and a pandemic strain might kill millions, according to WHO officials. The hens are essential because the most common way of making a protective vaccine involves growing viruses in the chickens’ eggs, said Philip Szepe, the owner of Kinross.
“These are very pampered birds, very important birds,” said Szepe, whose farm is in Kinglake, a town about 70 kilometers (44 miles) northeast of Melbourne. “It’s as close as you would get in the poultry world to a Hilton.”
CSL Ltd., a Kinross customer in Melbourne, is counting on eggs with the size, shape and shell thickness needed to grow the virus crucial to making vaccines. Egg suppliers around the world are standing by to send shipments to vaccine makers. All await word on whether world health officials will formally endorse the production of a shot against swine flu.
Black Saturday
Kinross’s birds, a mix of Hy-Line Brown and Hisex Brown breeds, almost went up in smoke in January during the Black Saturday fires, which killed 173 people in Victoria, the state that includes Kinglake. Two Kinross workers were fighting flames at the 620-acre (251-hectare) property, unaware that their own homes were among those burning, Szepe said.
The farm declines to disclose how many of its 600,000 hens make eggs for vaccines and thus get coddling not given others. Szepe, who also wouldn’t discuss egg prices, said the farm produces about 1 million eggs annually for vaccine, including 800,000 for CSL.
Under current global capacity, vaccine makers would be capable of producing 2.5 billion shots within 12 months of receiving a pandemic virus strain, requiring four years to meet global demand, according to a best-case scenario published in a February report by Oliver Wyman, a management consulting company based in New York.
Demand for vaccine will outstrip availability when a pandemic starts, and alternative technologies that don’t require ramping up supplies of chickens and eggs aren’t being embraced rapidly enough, said David Fedson, a former vaccine developer for Paris-based Sanofi Aventis SA.
‘In a Bind’
“We’re going to be in a bind,” said Fedson, now an independent specialist in pandemic preparedness. “People who have been talking about the potential for using inactivated vaccines for the world simply haven’t done their arithmetic.”
So-called inactivated vaccines contain viruses that have been killed, yet contain parts of the pathogen that prompt the body to mount an immune response.
Fedson urges the use of so-called live attenuated vaccines, such as MedImmune Inc.’s Flumist, which contain weakened forms of the live virus. These require less virus to achieve the same effect, so production is faster, he said.
As of yesterday, there were 5,251 laboratory-confirmed swine flu cases in 30 countries, according to WHO data. The death toll stood at 61, including 56 in Mexico.
1931 Breakthrough
In 1931, the scientists Ernest William Goodpasture and Alice Miles Woodruff invented methods for using eggs to cultivate viruses. Fertilized eggs are injected with a virus, which needs a living cell to grow. The virus is then extracted, purified and killed -- for jabbing into humans, where it can boost the immune system without causing disease.
One egg can produce roughly one shot, said Hiroshi Hashimoto, a spokesman for Kitasato Institute Research Center for Biologicals, in Saitama, Japan. Eggs are heated for two days at 37 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) for culturing after a virus gets injected in 11-day-old eggs at a laboratory at Kitasato.
While production methods have since been developed that entail neither eggs nor live virus, CSL is relying on the old technology.
“It’s the cheapest, safest and most effective way to respond in an emergency,” said Rachel David, a CSL spokeswoman.
New Vaccine?
CSL is the only flu vaccine producer in the Southern Hemisphere. The company has begun developing so-called seed virus, in preparation for making vaccines using swine flu strains sent from California and New Zealand, David said.
It’s also trialing an alternative method that doesn’t require live virus samples and relies instead on building a synthetic version of the pathogen from scratch using its genetic code. If successful, this approach would enable CSL to produce vaccines even when it couldn’t access virus samples, David said.
The regular flu shots now being made protect against three strains, including a seasonal variety of H1N1. Those inoculations would be unlikely to help against the new swine form of H1N1, according to the WHO.
The WHO said a panel will convene tomorrow to decide whether vaccine makers should be producing a separate swine flu shot. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Director-General Margaret Chan will meet company chief executive officers in Geneva on May 19 to discuss how they can respond to the new strain.
Seasonal Shots
Sanofi-Aventis, the world’s largest producer of seasonal flu vaccine, plans to finish making this year’s batch in August.
If Sanofi stops production “too fast” in favor of the shot for swine flu, it may have a shortage of inoculations for the seasonal varieties, Jacques Berger, head of the drugmaker’s Sanofi Pasteur vaccine unit in France, said May 5.
Baxter International Inc., based in Deerfield, Illinois, said it received swine flu virus from the WHO and started testing samples in an Austrian laboratory.
The company will use a technique that cuts production time and isn’t dependent on eggs. Its strategy is to inject the virus into a dish containing the Vero cell line, a culture of kidney cells from the African green monkey, in a process that takes 12 to 16 weeks, said Chris Bona, a Baxter spokesman. That compares with the four to six months needed to produce vaccine with eggs, according to WHO.
A study of 275 healthy volunteers showed the cell-based approach was safe and effective with a vaccine developed against H5N1 bird flu, the company reported in the New England Journal of Medicine last June.
Future of Flu
“Cell culture could represent the future of influenza vaccine production,” John Oxford, a professor of virology at the University of London, said in a statement issued by Baxter at the time of the journal report.
At Kinross, the lights are dimmed at 8 p.m. daily to simulate sunset, keeping the hens relaxed and ready to do what they do best the next morning, Szepe said.
“We’re the beginning of a long production chain that is flu vaccine, and it starts from our hens,” he said. “It’s very satisfying to know we’re a small cog in what will be a very big wheel.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net; Kanoko Matsuyama in Tokyo at kmatsuyama2@bloomberg.net.
By Simeon Bennett and Kanoko Matsuyama
May 13 (Bloomberg) -- Workers at Kinross Farm defended its hens against the worst wildfires in Australian history while their own homes burned. Now the birds may return the favor by protecting humans from swine flu.
The hens, housed in air-conditioned sheds and kept in shape with a vitamin-rich diet, blood tests and doctors’ visits, lay eggs critical to the creation of a new vaccine. It’s needed to foil the flu virus that may prompt the World Health Organization to declare the first pandemic since 1968.
Seasonal flu causes 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year globally, and a pandemic strain might kill millions, according to WHO officials. The hens are essential because the most common way of making a protective vaccine involves growing viruses in the chickens’ eggs, said Philip Szepe, the owner of Kinross.
“These are very pampered birds, very important birds,” said Szepe, whose farm is in Kinglake, a town about 70 kilometers (44 miles) northeast of Melbourne. “It’s as close as you would get in the poultry world to a Hilton.”
CSL Ltd., a Kinross customer in Melbourne, is counting on eggs with the size, shape and shell thickness needed to grow the virus crucial to making vaccines. Egg suppliers around the world are standing by to send shipments to vaccine makers. All await word on whether world health officials will formally endorse the production of a shot against swine flu.
Black Saturday
Kinross’s birds, a mix of Hy-Line Brown and Hisex Brown breeds, almost went up in smoke in January during the Black Saturday fires, which killed 173 people in Victoria, the state that includes Kinglake. Two Kinross workers were fighting flames at the 620-acre (251-hectare) property, unaware that their own homes were among those burning, Szepe said.
The farm declines to disclose how many of its 600,000 hens make eggs for vaccines and thus get coddling not given others. Szepe, who also wouldn’t discuss egg prices, said the farm produces about 1 million eggs annually for vaccine, including 800,000 for CSL.
Under current global capacity, vaccine makers would be capable of producing 2.5 billion shots within 12 months of receiving a pandemic virus strain, requiring four years to meet global demand, according to a best-case scenario published in a February report by Oliver Wyman, a management consulting company based in New York.
Demand for vaccine will outstrip availability when a pandemic starts, and alternative technologies that don’t require ramping up supplies of chickens and eggs aren’t being embraced rapidly enough, said David Fedson, a former vaccine developer for Paris-based Sanofi Aventis SA.
‘In a Bind’
“We’re going to be in a bind,” said Fedson, now an independent specialist in pandemic preparedness. “People who have been talking about the potential for using inactivated vaccines for the world simply haven’t done their arithmetic.”
So-called inactivated vaccines contain viruses that have been killed, yet contain parts of the pathogen that prompt the body to mount an immune response.
Fedson urges the use of so-called live attenuated vaccines, such as MedImmune Inc.’s Flumist, which contain weakened forms of the live virus. These require less virus to achieve the same effect, so production is faster, he said.
As of yesterday, there were 5,251 laboratory-confirmed swine flu cases in 30 countries, according to WHO data. The death toll stood at 61, including 56 in Mexico.
1931 Breakthrough
In 1931, the scientists Ernest William Goodpasture and Alice Miles Woodruff invented methods for using eggs to cultivate viruses. Fertilized eggs are injected with a virus, which needs a living cell to grow. The virus is then extracted, purified and killed -- for jabbing into humans, where it can boost the immune system without causing disease.
One egg can produce roughly one shot, said Hiroshi Hashimoto, a spokesman for Kitasato Institute Research Center for Biologicals, in Saitama, Japan. Eggs are heated for two days at 37 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) for culturing after a virus gets injected in 11-day-old eggs at a laboratory at Kitasato.
While production methods have since been developed that entail neither eggs nor live virus, CSL is relying on the old technology.
“It’s the cheapest, safest and most effective way to respond in an emergency,” said Rachel David, a CSL spokeswoman.
New Vaccine?
CSL is the only flu vaccine producer in the Southern Hemisphere. The company has begun developing so-called seed virus, in preparation for making vaccines using swine flu strains sent from California and New Zealand, David said.
It’s also trialing an alternative method that doesn’t require live virus samples and relies instead on building a synthetic version of the pathogen from scratch using its genetic code. If successful, this approach would enable CSL to produce vaccines even when it couldn’t access virus samples, David said.
The regular flu shots now being made protect against three strains, including a seasonal variety of H1N1. Those inoculations would be unlikely to help against the new swine form of H1N1, according to the WHO.
The WHO said a panel will convene tomorrow to decide whether vaccine makers should be producing a separate swine flu shot. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Director-General Margaret Chan will meet company chief executive officers in Geneva on May 19 to discuss how they can respond to the new strain.
Seasonal Shots
Sanofi-Aventis, the world’s largest producer of seasonal flu vaccine, plans to finish making this year’s batch in August.
If Sanofi stops production “too fast” in favor of the shot for swine flu, it may have a shortage of inoculations for the seasonal varieties, Jacques Berger, head of the drugmaker’s Sanofi Pasteur vaccine unit in France, said May 5.
Baxter International Inc., based in Deerfield, Illinois, said it received swine flu virus from the WHO and started testing samples in an Austrian laboratory.
The company will use a technique that cuts production time and isn’t dependent on eggs. Its strategy is to inject the virus into a dish containing the Vero cell line, a culture of kidney cells from the African green monkey, in a process that takes 12 to 16 weeks, said Chris Bona, a Baxter spokesman. That compares with the four to six months needed to produce vaccine with eggs, according to WHO.
A study of 275 healthy volunteers showed the cell-based approach was safe and effective with a vaccine developed against H5N1 bird flu, the company reported in the New England Journal of Medicine last June.
Future of Flu
“Cell culture could represent the future of influenza vaccine production,” John Oxford, a professor of virology at the University of London, said in a statement issued by Baxter at the time of the journal report.
At Kinross, the lights are dimmed at 8 p.m. daily to simulate sunset, keeping the hens relaxed and ready to do what they do best the next morning, Szepe said.
“We’re the beginning of a long production chain that is flu vaccine, and it starts from our hens,” he said. “It’s very satisfying to know we’re a small cog in what will be a very big wheel.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net; Kanoko Matsuyama in Tokyo at kmatsuyama2@bloomberg.net.
