In the race to cash in on the rapidly-growing market for swine flu treatments, Novartis has emerged as the surprise front runner for a vaccine. The Swiss drugmaker said Friday that it had produced a first batch of experimental vaccines to fight the H1N1 flu outbreak, and expected to ramp up manufacturing quickly thanks to a newly-discovered manufacturing method.
The breakthrough comes a day after the World Health Organization declared a swine flu pandemic, increasing its alert to the maximum level. Shares of
All major drugmakers received the H1N1 wild-type strain from the WHO two weeks ago to enable them to develop the vaccine, but Novartis is the first one to have said it will have the vaccines ready but this fall. Novartis said its research showed that it was quicker to make the vaccine through cell-based production, rather than traditional egg-based manufacturing.
"Novartis has successfully completed the production of the first batch of influenza A(H1N1) vaccine, weeks ahead of expectations," Novartis said, adding it expected to get a license for the vaccines from the World Health Organization in the autumn.
Cell-based manufacturing technology allows vaccine production to be initiated once a pandemic virus strain is identified without the need to adapt the virus strain to grow in eggs, as with traditional vaccine technologies, the drugmaker said. "This advance has cut weeks off the time required to begin vaccine production."
But other drugmakers are not lagging behind. "This is something all players have been working on. Novartis is working with cells and is able to work quicker," said Andrew Weiss, an analyst with Bank Vontobel. "But all of the other big players have started production in line with flu-vaccine production, which starts in March. This doesn't mean that Novartis will be the only player in the market in the fall."
Vaccines grown in cells represent less than 5% of the world's flu vaccine capacity, so Novartis' vaccine also is unlikely to provide a major competitve advantage to the drugmaker, nor will it provide a major boost in the supply of vaccines to treat the swine flu pandemic.
On Thursday the top producers of treatments for the H1N1 virus,
Weiss said the rally was not sustainable, however, and that another contributing factor to the rise in valuations was recent share upgrades. On Thursday, Morgan Stanley raised GlaxoSmithKline's rating to "equal-weight," for instance, in a review of European drug stocks.
Novartis is not the first drugmaker to seek a flu vaccine using cells: a laboratory in New Jersey has also been experimenting with cells to produce an experimental vaccine against influenza. (See "The Flu Vaccine Accelerator.")