Early vaccine availability represents an important public health advance for the control of pandemic influenza.

Amy L Greer

doi:10.1186/s13104-015-1157-1

Abstract

BackgroundTraditional processes for the production of pandemic influenza vaccines are not capable of producing a vaccine that could be deployed sooner than 5–6 months after strain identification. Plant-based vaccine technologies are of public health interest because they represent an opportunity to begin vaccinating earlier.MethodsWe used an age- and risk- structured disease transmission model for Canada to evaluate the potential impact of a plant-produced vaccine available for rapid deployment (within 1–3 months) compared to an egg-based vaccine timeline.ResultsWe found that in the case of a mildly transmissible virus (R0 = 1.3), depending on the amount of plant-based vaccine produced per week, severe clinical outcomes could be decreased by 60–100 % if vaccine was available within 3 months of strain identification. However, in the case of a highly transmissible virus (R0 = 2.0), a delay of 3 months does not change clinical outcomes regardless of the level of weekly vaccine availability. If transmissibility is high, the only strategy that can impact clinical outcomes occurs if vaccine production is high and available within 2 months.ConclusionsPandemic influenza vaccines produced by plants, change the timeline of pandemic vaccine availability in a way that could significantly mitigate the impact of the next influenza pandemic.

Highlights

Traditional processes for the production of pandemic influenza vaccines are not capable of producing a vaccine that could be deployed sooner than 5–6 months after strain identification
Simulation results for scenarios in the absence of any pandemic interventions were in line with previously published work describing influenza transmission in a mild pandemic (e.g. 2009) and a severe pandemic (e.g. 1918) [27,28,29,30,31,32]
Scenarios where the pandemic strain emerges in Canada in the spring (Fig. 1B) exhibit lower overall clinical attack rates than scenarios where the pandemic emerges in the fall (Fig. 1A)

Summary

Introduction

Traditional processes for the production of pandemic influenza vaccines are not capable of producing a vaccine that could be deployed sooner than 5–6 months after strain identification. Plant-based vaccine technologies are of public health interest because they represent an opportunity to begin vaccinating earlier. The 2009 (H1N1) influenza pandemic represented a unique public health challenge for the world. Countries have developed pandemic plans that include descriptions of available mitigation strategies and plans for deploying available public health resources and interventions such as vaccines, and antivirals, Most vaccine manufacturers who develop influenza vaccines use 9–12 day old embryonated eggs to produce the vaccine. The vaccine strain is injected into the eggs where it replicates over several days while the eggs are incubated. The egg contains many millions of vaccine virus particles that are purified to produce the antigen that

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