Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

In a major advancement in influenza science, India is ready with its first indigenous vaccine against H1N1 swine flu. Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) has developed a H1N1 vaccine — not a painful syringe shot but a harmless nasal spray — which can be used by anybody above the age of three except pregnant women. To cost around Rs 150, SII will apply to the drug controller general for licensure of its product next week. Scientists, who are presently completing tabulation of results from the vaccine’s phase-III clinical trial, say it is safe and effective with side-effects being runny nose and a bout of sneezing. Interestingly, the breakthrough comes exactly a year after India reported its first case of swine flu (May 15, 2009). Confirming this to TOI, SII’s executive director (operations) Adar Poonawala said, “Our nasal mist vaccine is now ready. We will apply for licensure next week. It had no side-effects which are synonymous to injectible vaccines like fever, swelling or conv...

GlaxoSmithKline Plc will buy a stake in Austria’s Intercell AG in a move that analysts said underscores drugmakers’ growing interest in vaccines. Glaxo will pay 33.6 million euros ($49.5 million) as part of the alliance to develop and market Intercell’s needle-free, patch-based immunizations for traveler’s diarrhea and pandemic influenza. The London-based drugmaker also will buy as much as 5 percent of Intercell for up to 84 million euros via a staggered shareholding option, the companies said in a statement today. XTractor Premium - A Platform for discovery , knowledge sharing, analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts. The only Knowledgebase which provides "manually" annotated facts from PubMed on a weekly basis Innovative Features like Semantic Search , Concept Linking , Bibliographic search , Save, Export and Visualize Only Knowledgebase with daily updations from PubMed XTractor Premium now at an Special Introductory Offer. Subscribe now and save! Re...

Industry response to the H1N1 pandemic suggests that cell culture vaccine production is about to come of age with two firms that use the technique, Novartis and Baxter, claiming it will cut development and manufacturing timelines by months. Margaret Chan officially declared the pandemic explaining that H1N1 infections worldwide can no longer be traced and that “ further spread is considered inevitable .” She asked drugmakers to begin preparing for large-scale H1N1 vaccine production when manufacture of seasonal stocks is completed, prompting a flurry of industry updates from vaccine producers. Baxter and Novartis aim for early availability The most eye-catching of these responses came from US drugmaker Baxter which announced it has completed testing of its Celvapan H1N1 vaccine and is “ now in full-scale production ,” and is working to deliver it as early as next month. Traditionally, seasonal influenza vaccines are mass produced using the albumin found in fertilised hens eggs a...

A team of American and French researchers used systems biology to identify gene signatures predicting human immune responses to the yellow fever vaccine, YF-17D. The work appeared in an advanced online publication in Nature Immunology yesterday. Using high-throughput gene expression measurements, multiplex analysis of cytokines and chemokines, and multi-parameter flow cytometry, investigators tested samples taken from more than a dozen individuals in the days and weeks following their yellow fever vaccination. Computational modeling allowed them to come up with signatures predicting CD8+ T-cell and neutralizing antibody responses to YF-17D — insights into vaccine immunogenicity that may inform future vaccine research and development. “The identification of gene signatures that correlate with, and are capable of predicting, the magnitudes of the antigen-specific CD8+ T-cell and neutralizing antibody responses provides the first methodological evidence that vaccine-induced immune r...