HHS Awards Sanofi Pasteur $97 Million Contract to Develop Cell-Based Vaccines

The HHS has awarded a $97 million contract to sanofi pasteur to support the development of cell culture-based influenza vaccines, an advanced type of flu vaccine the agency hopes can be manufactured faster and in larger volumes than traditional egg-based vaccines.

The five-year contract calls for sanofi pasteur, the vaccines arm of sanofi-aventis, to develop, scale-up and manufacture clinical investigational lots of inactivated influenza vaccines using human cells. The vaccines will be tested in human clinical trials in adult, elderly and pediatric populations within the U.S., the HHS said. The agreement also calls for sanofi pasteur to develop plans for a U.S. manufacturing facility capable of producing at least 300 million doses of a pandemic influenza vaccine using cell culture-based technology.

Currently licensed influenza vaccines are produced in chicken eggs in a labor-intensive process that takes nearly nine months. Cell culture-based vaccines use mammalian cells to grow the influenza viruses -- a process that reduces production times by eliminating the lengthy process of adapting the virus strains to grow in eggs, the HHS said. The cell culture-based approach can also yield more dosages because cells may be frozen in advance and large volumes grown quickly.