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Work could yield cheaper doses that will be immediately available here and in S-E Asia
 THERE could soon be a made-in-Singapore flu vaccine. A group of agencies here have come together to
take the project from basic research right through to initial human trials.
The work could yield a vaccine cheaper than the $20 to $30 a dose which conventional imported vaccines now cost.
A vaccine made here also means it will be immediately available when needed here or in South-east Asia.
Just last month, for example, Singapore was up against a shortage of flu vaccines because of a high global demand for them.
Because Singapore does not make its own flu vaccines, it has had to wait in line to buy them from countries that do.
In the case of the outbreak of a novel strain of H1N1 influenza last year, the waiting had potentially dire consequences: By the time Singapore’s one million doses of the vaccine ordered in September arrived at the year end, the worst of the outbreak was over.
The announcement of the plan to produce a vaccine here comes a year after H1N1 caused a global pandemic. The virus has so far killed more than 18,000 people worldwide.
The lead investigator of the project, Associate Professor Ooi Eng Eong of the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, said: “Singapore has invested a sizeable amount in biomedical research, and we want what we’re doing to directly benefit the Singapore community.”
Two Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) institutes – the Experimental Therapeutics Centre and the Singapore Immunology Network – will work with Swiss biotech firm Cytos Biotechnology to develop and produce the vaccine.
DSO National Laboratories will test the vaccine on animals, while the Duke-NUS school and the Singapore
Clinical Research Institute will run the initial human tests.
The vaccine, which can be adapted to protect people against pandemic flu strains like H1N1, avian influenza and seasonal flu strains, is expected to enter the initial stage of human testing by early next year.
After the tests are completed, the investigators hope to attract investors to license the vaccine for further trials and production, said Professor Alex Matter, chief executive of the Experimental Therapeutics Centre.
When it is commercialised, A*Star subsidiaries will be entitled to make the vaccine for Singapore and other Asean countries, and earn royalties from worldwide sales.
Prof Ooi explained that vaccines are the main defence against pandemic influenza, given that antiviral drugs like Tamiflu are pricey.
The new vaccine, which uses a benign virus as a carrier to which flu-virus proteins are attached, will work by waking up the body’s immune response.
This happens when the body’s immune receptors “recognise” the flu proteins and read their presence as a viral attack on the body.
But because the vaccine’s virus-like particles contain no influenza DNA, they cannot make people ill.
Virus-like particle vaccines for influenza and other illnesses are in clinical trials, but none is on the market yet.
The World Health Organisation counts about 600 million cases of seasonal influenza worldwide every year. Of those who fall ill from it annually, three million become severely ill and half a million die.
Commenting on the home-grown vaccine effort, Dr Wong Sin Yew, an infectious diseases physician and former head of the Communicable Disease Centre, said: “In the case of a pandemic, having a vaccine facility in Singapore will, it is hoped, help produce the vaccines faster.
“It’s also a good thing for the pharmaceutical industry here to have the capacity to make biologicals.”
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