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Slow Progress in Pandemic Vaccine Contract Frustrates Scientists, Officials

Posted on: Wednesday, 26 October 2005, 18:00 CDT

By HELEN BRANSWELL

TORONTO (CP) - Negotiations over production of trial batches of an H5N1 avian flu vaccine for Canada have been bogged down for months, leaving federal officials frustrated and experts worried the country may be losing a precious opportunity to fast-track vaccine development should the virus trigger a pandemic.

Meanwhile a string of other countries - including the United States, Hungary, Thailand, Australia, Japan and China - have either started or will soon commence clinical trials in bids to develop safe and effective vaccines against the H5N1 strain.

Scientists here and abroad worry the delay may not only jeopardize successful production of an H5N1 vaccine for this country if the strain goes on to trigger a pandemic, but squanders an opportunity for Canada to make a real contribution to efforts to find ways to eke as many doses of vaccine out of the global output as possible.

"I think Canada's contribution around avian influenza - its global contribution - could have been vaccine research, development and evaluation," Dr. Robert Brunham, director of the British Columbia Center for Disease Control, said Wednesday.

"We're losing that ability to have made a global contribution and we may even be making ourselves vulnerable by having this slowdown in the whole process."

As recently as two weeks ago, federal officials thought the deal was nearly done and would be completed in time to be announced at this week's international pandemic influenza conference in Ottawa. That was not to be.

"Frankly, we are a little frustrated with the delays the company keeps throwing in the way of concluding the contract," a senior Health Canada official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday.

The CEO of ID Biomedical, the company that holds Canada's pandemic flu vaccine contract, expressed surprise when he learned of that comment.

"It does strike me as very curious that they're blaming it on us," Tony Holler said in an interview from Vancouver.

"I expect that this agreement with the government will be signed shortly."

Once the contract is signed, it will take ID Biomedical a full 12 months to produce the trial batches of vaccine. That's because the company must build a special high-containment facility - a plant within a plant - to work with the dangerous virus.

Construction will take eight months and certification of the facility will take another two. It will then take two months to make the vaccine.

That means at the earliest, the Public Health Agency of Canada could take possession of and begin testing of the vaccine by late 2006.

Source: Canadian Press

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