The WHO yesterday announced a new project to accelerate the development in poorer nations of vaccines for human avian influenza infections using cutting-edge messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology.
The WHO said Argentine manufacturer Sinergium Biotech would lead the effort and had already begun developing candidate H5N1 vaccines.
Bird flu H5N1 first emerged in 1996, but since 2020 an exponential growth in outbreaks in birds has occurred in parallel with the virus increasingly jumping to mammals, including cattle in US farms and a few humans.
Photo: AFP
This has prompted fears the virus could spark a future pandemic.
Sinergium is aiming to establish proof-of-concept in preclinical models for its candidate vaccines, the WHO said.
Once the preclinical data is ready, the technology, materials and expertise would be shared with a network of manufacturers in poorer nations, allowing them to accelerate their own development and production.
The UN health agency said the project would be rolled out through the mRNA technology transfer program it established with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool in 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That program was aimed to help low and middle-income nations, which found themselves dramatically underserved during the pandemic, to develop and produce their own vaccines using mRNA.
The technology instructs the body to produce a unique protein that stimulates an immune response, teaching it to defend against the infection.
Swiftly developed mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were game-changers during the pandemic, but they also exposed glaring global vaccine inequity.
“This initiative exemplifies why WHO established the mRNA Technology Transfer Programme,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
That program, which counts 15 manufacturing partners in nations ranging from South Africa to Ukraine to Vietnam, was aimed “to foster greater research, development and production in low and middle-income countries,” he said.
That way, “when the next pandemic arrives, the world will be better prepared to mount a more effective and more equitable response,” he added.
The WHO has said there are a range of traditional influenza vaccines already licensed for pandemic use that could potentially be tailored to combat H5N1 if it begins spreading among people, but Martin Friede, who heads the WHO’s vaccine research unit, said focusing on developing mRNA-based vaccines was particularly interesting when seeking to establish sustainable production capacity.
Previous efforts to boost influenza vaccine production in developing nations had often faltered, with facilities narrowly focused on egg-based pandemic influenza jabs shutting after the threat dissipated and governments stopped procuring doses.
“The advantage of mRNA is that, in theory, we can make a COVID vaccine, we can make H5N1 vaccines, but also many other vaccines and importantly also therapeutics,” Friede told reporters.
If the need for H5N1 vaccines or other jabs fades, instead of shutting down production, “we hope that all of the partners will be able to produce something else,” he said.
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