[Ip-health] Nature: Vaccine venture boosts health hopes

[Suerie Moon]

--
[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
Nature: Vaccine venture boosts health hopes
Published online 16 September 2009 | Nature 461, 323 (2009) | doi:10.1038/4=
61323a

Industry and academia join forces to develop cheap jabs against diseases th=
at afflict the poorest.
Declan Butler
Vaccines for neglected diseases are non-existent or unsuitable in poor coun=
tries.M. SWARUP/AP PHOTO

US
pharmaceutical giant Merck and Company and the UK Wellcome Trust will
create a joint, not-for-profit =C2=A390-million (US$150-million) research
centre in India to develop affordable vaccines against diseases that
afflict the poor =E2=80=94 including neglected diseases for which inadequat=
e or
no vaccines exist. The move marks the first time that a major
medical-research charity and a pharmaceutical company have directly
partnered to create vaccines aimed at low-income countries.

"It's
a tremendous development," says Adel Mahmoud, a former president of
Merck Vaccines and now a professor at Princeton University in New
Jersey. Unlike drugs for neglected diseases, he says, "vaccines for
neglected diseases have not been given any significant attention over
the years."

The new research centre will be named after the
late Maurice Hilleman, a Merck scientist who developed more than 40
vaccines, including against measles and hepatitis B. Its location in
India has yet to be selected, but it is expected to open by the end of
next year.

The centre will be headed by Altaf Lal, currently
health attach=C3=A9 at the US embassy in New Delhi and the South Asia
regional representative for the US health and human services
department. Lal says it will bridge the translational research gap that
exists between academic scientists and clinical programmes, to help
take promising leads to the proof-of-concept stage.

Despite
being a non-profit organization, the centre will be run as a business,
and will be free beyond its =C2=A390-million seed funding to pursue
partnerships with academics, companies, governments and philanthropic
bodies. The centre's portfolio will include high-risk research into
diseases for which no vaccines are currently available, says Ted
Bianco, director of technology transfer at the Wellcome Trust in
London. It will also aim for more immediate pay-offs, such as improving
existing vaccines that are too expensive or poorly adapted for
distribution in hot, resource-poor countries, where maintaining a chain
of refrigeration is complicated.
"The centre will bring the
scientific and technical skills of an extremely advanced vaccine
company like Merck to bear," says Marie-Paule Kieny, vaccine-research
director at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland,
adding that the direct involvement of the Wellcome Trust confers
considerable credibility on the venture's goals.

Prospects for
vaccines in low-income countries have recently improved. Public=E2=80=93pri=
vate
partnerships have been set up to develop vaccines against the big
killers, such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, and the drug firm Novartis last
year opened an in-house, non-profit research institute in northern
Italy to develop vaccines for diarrhoeal diseases (see Nature  451,  1037; =
2008). The Geneva-based global health partnership the GAVI Alliance,
created in 2000, has also greatly increased and accelerated the
introduction and distribution of large

volumes of vaccines.
=E2=80=9CWe really want to lower a lot of the barriers that exist for devel=
oping promising products.=E2=80=9D
Mark Feinberg

But
the crucial missing component has been bringing academic development
together with industrial expertise, says Bianco. "Merck are terrific
partners to have," he says. "When making vaccines, know-how is hugely
significant, and vaccines are a struggle to get into developing
countries without it." As well as funding the centre, Merck will offer
access to its own researchers, its technologies such as adjuvants and
its expertise in clinical trials, says Mark Feinberg, the company's
vice-president of medical affairs and policy.

The joint
venture has yet to decide which diseases it will tackle, but will base
the decisions on criteria such as scientific and technical feasibility,
affordability and whether vaccine formulations will meet the field and
other needs of the large procurement agencies such as the WHO, the
United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the GAVI Alliance. One
candidate being explored for vaccine suitability is the Group A
Streptococcus bacterium, which causes some 400,000 deaths annually in
poor countries but has attracted little research funding.

To
start whittling down the list of potential candidates, Wellcome and
Merck organized a meeting of scientists and other stakeholders in
January this year at a research centre in Kilifi, Kenya, part of the
Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI). The two partners have also
created an advisory group of external scientists chaired by David
Heymann, a former assistant director-general of the WHO and now
chairman of the UK Health Protection Agency.

The Indian centre will also collaborate with local
pharmaceutical companies that can cheaply produce any vaccines it
develops. That's novel, says Kieny, and may well pave the way for
Western vaccine makers to allow generic versions of vaccines, such as
those against human papillomavirus or pneumonia, which are available in
rich countries but too expensive for poorer ones.

"Affordability
will be key in the technical and other choices all along the product
design and development path," says Feinberg. "We really want to lower a
lot of the barriers that exist for developing promising products."_________=
____________________
Suerie Moon, MPA
Doctoral Candidate and Research Fellow
Sustainability Science Program, Center for International Development
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
suerie_moon@hksphd.harvard.edu