New anthrax vaccine passes first round of tests

Good news on the anthrax front. We reported last week on the ongoing trouble with the much-vaunted $5.6 billion BioShield project to develop vaccines against bioterror agents, with anthrax heading the priority list. Bad blood between Emergent, previously the nation’s only anthrax vaccine manufacturer, and VaxGen, the company that received an exclusive DHS contract to develop a new, more reliable version, threatened to break out into litigation after VaxGen failed to succeed and the government announced it would buy $243 million of Emergent’s older formula. Now we hear that both companies may be left in the dust by Billington, United Kingdom-based Avecia. The company announced this week it had succesfully tested its own anthrax vaccine, one that required only two doses in a single month.

The new vaccine is the result of a collaborative effort between Avecia, which received $71 million for its efforts, and Army researchers who on their own “engineered a key ingredient they believed would make a vaccine less likely to cause skin irritations and other problems,” AP reported, (the Defense Science and Technology Lab, part of the British Ministry of Defense, participated in the testing but not the development). Research volunteers received two shots of various strength, one at the start of the study and another three or four weeks later. According to Dr. Andrew Simpson, the test found the subjects developed immunity to anthrax but that it may be a touch weaker than the Emergent and VaxGen approaches. How much that will set the project back is unknown because there is little data on anthrax infection, and medical ethics prevent intentional exposure. A larger study now underway in Britain and the United States may help shed some light.

-read more in Marilynn Marchione’s AP report