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The
Pentagon’s DARPA lab has announced a milestone, but it doesn’t involve drones
or death missiles. Scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
say they’ve produced 10 million doses of an influenza vaccine in only one
month’s time.
In
a press release out of the agency’s office this week, scientists with DARPA say
they’ve reach an important step in being able to combat a flu pandemic that
might someday decimate the Earth’s population. By working with the Medicago
Inc. vaccine company, the Pentagon’s cutting edge research lab says that
they’ve used a massive harvest of tobacco plants to help produce a plethora of
flu-fighting vaccines.
“Testing
confirmed that a single dose of the H1N1 VLP influenza vaccine candidate
induced protective levels of hem agglutinin antibodies in an animal model when
combined with a standard aluminium adjuvant,” the agency writes, while still
noting, though, that “The equivalent dose required to protect humans from
natural disease can only be determined by future, prospective clinical trials.”
Researchers
have before relied on using chicken eggs to harvest compounds to use in
influenza vaccines. With a future outbreak requiring scientists to step up with
a solution as soon as possible, though, they’ve turned to tobacco plants to
help produce the vaccines.
“Vaccinating
susceptible populations during the initial stage of a pandemic is critical to
containment,” Dr. Alan Magill, DARPA program manager, says in an official
statement. “We’re looking at plant-based solutions to vaccine production as a
more rapid and efficient alternative to the standard egg-based technologies and
the research is very promising.”
The
World Health Organization has gone on the record to say that as much as half of
the people on the planet could be affected by a pandemic in the near future,
and it could take as much as nine months for a vaccine for a pandemic virus
strain to become made available. With the lives of billions of people across
the world at stake, DARPA has been trying to determine new ways of churning out
antidotes in as little time as possible. Now its researchers say, that in only
a month, scientists “produced more than 10 million doses (as defined in an
animal model) of an H1N1 influenza vaccine candidate based on virus-like
particles (VLP).”
Through
DARPA’s previously established Blue Angel program, researchers have spent
several years searching for new ways to produce mass quantities of
vaccine-grade protein that could be used to combat what they say are very real
emerging and novel biological threats.
Andy
Sheldon, Chief Executive Officer of Medicago , says in the company’s own press
release that “The completion of the rapid fire test marks a substantial
achievement in demonstrating our technology and the potential for Medicago to
be the first responder in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak.”
Medicago’s
research was conducted in a 97,000-square-foot vaccine facility in North
Carolina that was funded through a $21 million Technology Investment Agreement
with DARPA.
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