Magic Shots
BV Mahalakshmi, Sudhir Chowdhary
Posted online: Monday , June 16, 2008 at 0111 hrs
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Magic-Shots/323280/#
Vaccines
are hot. The global vaccine market, which was earlier thought as a low
margin, low growth industry, is now attracting the interest of all
major pharmaceutical giants. Market is already seeing growth rates
faster than the traditional pharmaceutical market. With many new
blockbuster potential vaccines likely to hit the market, the growth is
only expected to increase.
The global vaccine market is set to almost double by the year
2010—it is expected to reach $21.05 billion by 2010 from $11.42 billion
in 2006—fuelled by unprecedented product innovations and global
recognition of the benefits of immunisation. But just a few years ago,
vaccine makers were leaving the field, citing low profits and high
production costs. Now, new vaccines are hitting the market in adult,
therapeutic and influenza vaccine segments.
(GM Vaccines!!!)
With healthcare reforms underway in Africa, Asia and Latin
America, Indian vaccine makers are bidding on capitalising the
opportunity round the corner. In the last couple of years, it has
become possible to produce new types of vaccines, which consist of
smaller entities of the disease-provoking micro organisms, such as
proteins, peptides, and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The advantages of
the new vaccines are improved efficacy, less side-effects and at the
same time, preventing the risk of catching the disease.
In addition, domestic vaccine makers are looking to strengthen
their operations—research and development (R&D) as well as
marketing—to capitalise on opportunities emerging from Asia, Africa and
Latin America. The pressures of rising costs for the global vaccine
manufacturers has enabled the regional vaccine manufacturers from
places like India to enter into the global vaccines market and has also
provided them the platform to expand their presence.
Thus, biotech vaccines are starting to push back the
conventional ones. The days of injecting a single shot to keep
diseases, says cholera, tetanus, hepatitis or measles, are gone.
Instead, what we have in the market are combination vaccines that are easy to
administer, cheap and extremely effective.
Also, researchers are going beyond the lab levels and now to
space-based research. A recent report from BioSpace Technologies says
that biotech research has taken a giant leap following the launch of a
Nasa shuttle containing an experiment for development of a Salmonella
vaccine. Researchers believe that the conditions in space, particularly
the microgravity, provide a superior environment for the development of
a Salmonella vaccine.
Quite clearly, the biggest factor driving the vaccine market is
its potential to prevent deaths due to diseases. Every year, two
million deaths are averted through immunisation, says a recent World
Health Organisation (WHO) report, stressing with continued vaccine
developments, four to five million annual deaths could be prevented by
2015.
After all, the statistics on vaccine preventable diseases like
cholera, malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and typhoid are astounding. These
diseases kill 1.9 million children annually. Around 2,000 million are
infected by TB, another 2,400 million are affected by malaria and every
day, there are 15,000 new AIDS infections.
At present, paediatric vaccines account for almost two-thirds
of the global vaccine sales. Going forward, this segment will loose its
share to the adult, therapeutic and influenza vaccine segments. After
all, the battle against infectious diseases is far from over. We have
witnessed a growing number of new diseases emerging in the past couple
of years. Both the contemporary Sars and bird flu have been active all
over the world. However, several challenges still remain, one of the
biggest being the wide gap between the developed and the developing
world in terms of accessibility and quality of vaccines.
According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, the
developed markets in North America, Europe and Japan account for almost
80% of the global vaccine market. However, there is a set of emerging
markets such as Africa, Asia (India and China in particular) and Latin
America which are fast becoming the backbone for the growth of global
vaccines market.
Developing and under developed markets in these
regions are being given a higher level of importance by WHO and
Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) to control several diseases by
effective immunisation. And, the funding for vaccination programmes in
these markets is drawn from developed markets, which indirectly
subsidise the cost of vaccines.
For the Indian vaccine makers, not only is there a real
opportunity to tap these emerging markets, they could also ramp up
their research and development (R&D) pipeline by attracting
billions of dollars of funding that are going into developing vaccines.
One of the ways they are doing this is by focusing their efforts on
biotech vaccines (Read Genetically Modified!!), which vaccine makers claim to
be superior to the
conventional ones.
Traditionally, vaccines have consisted of weakened micro
organisms. Suchitra Ella, joint managing director, Bharat Biotech,
says, “Conventional bacterial vaccines for cholera and typhoid are
derived from inactivated or killed cell organelles. This makes them
more reactive thereby causing adverse reactions. The efficacy of these
vaccines is also of shorter duration.” Not surprising, conventional
viral vaccines such as those for rabies has given place to a tissue
culture-derived rabies vaccine of higher safety, purity and efficacy,
she informs.
According to Ella, recombinant DNA technology makes it
eminently possible to produce safe, pure and efficacious vaccines due
to identification of the appropriate antigen or subunit of the
organism. Hepatitis B vaccine is a classic example of a
biotechnology-derived vaccine. Human papilloma virus vaccine is another
fine example of a biotech product. The next generation vaccines such as
dengue vaccine, yellow fever vaccine, flu vaccine and Japanese
encephalitis vaccine will be completely biotech-derived, she adds.
“Conventional vaccines are sort of crude, whereas biotech
vaccines produced by recombinant DNA technology are highly defined and
more specific with batch-to-batch consistency and lesser side effects,”
says Varaprasad Reddy, managing director, Shantha Biotechnics. The
company is working on Hepatitis B vaccine, DTP-HepB (tetravalent),
DTP-HepB-Hib (pentavalent) and the pipeline is targeted for rotavirus,
cholera and typhoid—all based on recombinant DNA technology.
Yet another success story is emerging from Indian
Immunologicals. The company is working on human vaccines in rDNA,
hepatitis B, measles, DPT, tetanus, among others. Serum Institute of
India, which supplies vaccines to over 137 countries across the world,
has tied up with Gates Foundation and PATH for accessing testing
technology for developing a pneumococcal vaccine.
Biotech vaccine makers are gung ho on joining hands with
leading research institutes like National Institute of Cholera &
Enteric Diseases, Kolkata, National Institute of Immunology, All India
Institute of Medical Sciences, Central Drug Research Institute, among
others, for developing new generation
vaccines.---------------------------------------------------------
Posted by:
Jagannath Chatterjee,Orissa State Head: India-Force, New Delhi,
Loksatta, Hyderabad/Maharashtra,
MANITHAM, Chennai.General Secretary:
NOVAC (Network of Anti-Vaccination Activists)
"It is now 30 years since I have been confining myself to the treatment of
chronic diseases. During those 30 years I have run against so many histories of
little children who had never seen a sick day until they were vaccinated and
who, in the several years that have followed, have never seen a well day since.
I couldn't put my finger on the disease they have. They just weren't strong.
Their resistance was gone. They were perfectly well before they were
vaccinated. They have never been well since. "---Dr. William Howard Hay
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