Emergent fights to fill VaxGen's BioShield contract

With Brisbane, California-based VaxGen out of the Project BioShield project, it is

left to Gaitherburg, Maryland-based Emergent Biosolutions to provide all of the United States’s anthrax vaccine needs, including 75 million doses for a national stockpile. (The company has sold 10 million for that puporse already.) This would typically be good news for a company already preparing for an IPO expected to raise $92 million, yet there is a hitch: the U.S. government wants its future doses to use advanced vaccine technology that only requires two or three shots to produce immunity, rather than the six currently employed in Emergent’s product. Unless the company can solve the problem, it is unlikely that the federal government will revert back to Emergent, which despite producing anthrax vaccine for soldiers was ineligible for the BioShield project.

Not that the company does not have any good ideas. “We think we can position this as a true next-generation product,” said CEO Fuad El-Hibri. It recently signed a licensing deal with Wellesley, Massachusetts-based Coley Pharmaceutical Group to use its VaxImmune adjuvant, an additive that can boost a vaccine’s strength — “like putting new wheels on an older car in hopes that it will go faster,” the Washington Post reported — and a study performed on the enhanced treatment found that those who received it “developed peak concentrations of key antibodies 6.3 times higher than those who received the vaccine alone, and the peak was reached 21 days sooner.” One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the adjuvant does not do anything about the debilitating side effects associated with the Emergent vaccine, which was originally one of the main reasons for opening up the BioShield project for bidding. Whether or not the federal government will want to use such a controversial treatment, even if the alternative is no treatment at all, remains to be seen.