Sanofi Pasteur bird flu vaccine clears first trial

Sanofi Pasteur has announced that its new candidate for a H5N1 vaccine was well-tolerated by patients and that it successfully generated an immune response, with or without an adjuvant.

Studied were conducted in France and the US, where they found that two 90 microgram does were necessary to provoke an immune response in half of the trial participants. The company says it will submit the results to the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products, a process the company claims will reduce the time taken for approval if a pandemic of a possible human-to-human version of the H5N1 virus is announced.

A statement from the French company read: “Follow-up studies, currently being planned, will be performed using vaccine produced at the company’s Val de Reuil, France facility, where it will be produced on an industrial scale, which will mimic the manufacturing scale that will be used during a declared pandemic.”

In September 2005, Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccine subsidiary of Sanofi-Aventis, received $150 million dollars from the US government to help speed up development of its H5N1 vaccines.

Last week, the US government also handed out $1 billion (528 million pounds) to several pharmaceutical companies in order to further the research and manufacturing of influenza vaccines. The companies included Solvay and Novartis, as well as GlaxoSmithKline, which received $275 million for the continued development of its two H5N1 vaccine candidates.

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