adjuvants: the miracle solution to boosting supply of bird flu vaccine

Filed in archive News , Studies on February 13, 2006

Medical researchers bracing for a global influenza epidemic are in frantic search of a way to perform a loaves-and-fishes miracle with the world's skimpy annual production of flu vaccine.

Strongly states the first paragraph of a special report on the Washington Post.

Most experts believe that a vaccine is the only tool capable of stopping a flu pandemic. It has been quite alarming that the H5N1 strain of "bird flu" that first caused human deaths in Hong Kong in 1997 has moved across Central Asia into Eastern Europe and Africa. All the virus needs to trigger a pandemic is the capacity to spread easily among humans.

To prepare for a looming pandemic and to start working on a miracle, biologists have turned to "adjuvants," substances added to conventional vaccines to increase their potency.

Adjuvants make small doses of vaccine act big. They focus the immune system's attention on the "antigen" -- the substance that stimulates the protective effect. Some adjuvants even broaden immunity and make it longer-lasting. Scientists do not know exactly how adjuvants do all this. But they do know they make it possible to dilute a vaccine with no loss of effect.

Since their discovery in 1925, adjuvants have been mostly curiosities -- occasionally useful, occasionally dangerous. It now appears they will make or break a pandemic flu vaccine. Nineteen clinical trials of pandemic flu shots -- against H5N1 and three other types of avian influenza -- are scheduled to be run this year. Seventeen of the vaccines will contain an adjuvant.

The world is watching in the hope of enough avian flu vaccine for global consumption prior to a pandemic. Otherwise, the only solution experts can think of is "social distancing," which is the new politically correct way of saying "quarantine."

Read NY Times' Primer for a Pandemic.