Big Pharma Again Taking Shot At Vaccines

Peter Benesh
On 6:26 pm EST, Tuesday November 3, 2009
The news lately has been all about H1N1. Serious as the swine flu pandemic is, the vaccine is pretty ordinary from a scientific point 15f view.
The trick is making enough of it fast enough and getting it delivered where it needs to be in sufficient amounts.

Beyond H1N1, vaccines are becoming a high-priority category for big biopharma companies.

Low prices, high costs and fear of lawsuits drove most Big Pharma firms out of the vaccine business in the 1980s and 1990s. They're back.

On Oct. 15, Pfizer (NYSE:PFE - News) closed its $68 billion acquisition of Wyeth. One of Wyeth's big products is a vaccine called Prevnar, to prevent meningitis and several types of infections in children. Prevnar sales are expected to hit $3 billion this year.

On Sept. 28, four events took place to usher Big Pharma back deeper into the vaccine field.

Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT - News) announced that it would buy the drug unit of Belgium's Solvay for $6.6 billion. Solvay makes Influvac, a flu vaccine that opens the door for Abbott's entry into the vaccine market.

Abbott will leapfrog the conventional flu vaccine, which is based on the slow and contamination-vulnerable method of growing virus cultures in eggs. Abbott got Solvay's Dutch plant for making flu vaccine from cells (rather than eggs), an emerging technology.

The same day, Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ - News) bought 18% of Dutch biotech Crucell, which is working on a universal flu vaccine.

Merck (NYSE:MRK - News) that day got the rights to sell Australia-based CSL's Afluria flu vaccine in the U.S.

And GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK - News) signed a 10-year, $2.2 billion deal to provide Brazil with its Synflorix pneumococcal vaccine. Vaccines are a point 15f entry for drugmakers into emerging economies.

Vaccine technology itself is emerging from prevention to treating people who are already ill.

Targets include cancer, HIV-AIDS, hepatitis, tuberculosis, malaria, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and others. One goal is a therapeutic vaccine against Alzheimer's disease.

Science has created vaccines to prevent many life-threatening diseases, including polio, measles, mumps and chicken pox. Add to that list seasonal influenza and, of course, swine flu. Companies making injected H1N1 vaccine for the U.S. are Novartis (NYSE:NVS - News), GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur, a unit of Sanofi-Aventis (NYSE:SNY - News). MedImmune, a unit of AstraZeneca (NYSE:AZN - News), and Australia's CSL Biotherapies make an inhaled vaccine.

Vaccines get the immune system to produce antibodies to fight diseases before they strike. Vaccines contain weakened disease antigens -- the components of a disease that cause it to attack the immune system. Weakened, the antigens can't cause the diseases, but they can trigger the body's immune response.