Protein Sciences tests caterpillar-based flu vaccine

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, say researchers at Meridien, Connecticut-based Protein Sciences. The company has developed a method of creating flu vaccines that rely on caterpillar cells, rather than bird eggs — the most common approach. “Eggs can be very cumbersome to work with,” said John Treanor of the University of Rochester Medical Center, who recently announced the results of a succesful test of the Protein Sciences technique. “When you need hundreds of millions of fertilized eggs, you’re dealing with a whole host of agricultural issues, as well as scientific concerns regarding the flu virus itself.” Among the problems, Treanor noted, is that using eggs can take a long time — six months at least — time that may be wanting in the face of a massive epidemic. Moreover, it may not be advisable to use bird eggs during a bird flu incident.

The egg-based approach grows flu viruses in hundreds of millions of fertilized eggs, with each egg containing less than a teaspoonful of material that will ultimately become part of a vaccine. Protein Sciences’s FluBlOk method, however, relies on a virus known as baculovirus, which normally infects insects, to churn out the key components of the flu virus. And unlike other vaccines, the FluBl0k does not include neuraminidase, an enzyme that allows a flu virus to replicate and spread — an issue of great importance to scientist who have been curious as to how a vaccine without neuraminidase would perform.