23 August 2010
A venture capital fund should be created by the U.S. government to invest in companies developing ways to defend the nation from flu pandemics and bioterrorist attacks, U.S. health officials said. A report from Health and Human Services (HHS) officials urged development of a $200 million fund that would invest in new ways to thwart potential public health threats from viruses or biological agents. In a separate study, a panel of scientists and technology industry executives, created by President Barack Obama, said the United States needs to spend $1 billion annually to expand and modernize vaccine production.
Bloomberg’s Pat Wechsler and Ellen Gibson write that Obama had asked for better ways to protect the United States after last season’s swine flu pandemic killed about 13,000 Americans. The President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology concluded that the nation’s response was “three to five months slower than ideal” and that new ways should be found to make vaccines quickly.
“Today, we really don’t know where our next public health crisis is going to come from,” said Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Our enemies are constantly probing for weakness. Our nation must have a system that is nimble and flexible enough to produce countermeasures quickly.”
The swine flu pandemic left 13,000 Americans dead, including a disproportionate number of children and young adults compared with usual seasonal influenzas. Initial projections of the death toll were as much as ten times higher, leading to concern when vaccine manufacturing was delayed by problems related to outdated technology and science.
Wechsler and Gibson write that the President’s Council, whose members include Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google Inc. and Yale University president Richard Levin, had warned Obama in August 2009 that the H1N1 virus may kill from 30,000 to 90,000 Americans after infecting up to half the population and hospitalizing 1.8 million. The deaths would be in addition to the more than 30,000 who die from seasonal flu, the panel said.
The swine flu virus, H1N1, did not turn out to be so deadly, but future pandemics may be severe so the nation needs to invest in vaccine production and technology to speed up manufacture and delivery, according to the report.
“In a serious pandemic, cutting even a few weeks off the vaccine production schedule can translate into saving thousands of lives,” said Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who supervised work on the report. “The good news is we now know how to reduce the likelihood of such delays with new and improved technologies.”
Drug companies grew the H1N1 virus needed to make the vaccine using egg cultures, a traditional approach too slow to produce enough doses quickly. Both reports recommended a move away from egg-based production to cell-culture systems and recombinant vaccines using genetic engineering tools.
HHS said it would use $1.9 billion already appropriated to deal with pandemic preparedness. In addition to the strategic investment firm, the report recommends the creation of Centers for Innovation to with industry promoting flexible manufacturing technology able to respond to public health threats.
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