| Magic Shots BV Mahalakshmi, Sudhir Chowdhary Posted online: Monday , June 16, 2008 at 0111 hrs http://www.financia Vaccines are hot. The global vaccine market, which was earlier thought as a low margin, low growth industry, is now attracting the interest of all major pharmaceutical giants. Market is already seeing growth rates faster than the traditional pharmaceutical market. With many new blockbuster potential vaccines likely to hit the market, the growth is only expected to increase.
The global vaccine market is set to almost double by the year 2010—it is expected to reach $21.05 billion by 2010 from $11.42 billion in 2006—fuelled by unprecedented product innovations and global recognition of the benefits of immunisation. But just a few years ago, vaccine makers were leaving the field, citing low profits and high production costs. Now, new vaccines are hitting the market in adult, therapeutic and influenza vaccine segments. (GM Vaccines!!!)
With healthcare reforms underway in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Indian vaccine makers are bidding on capitalising the opportunity round the corner. In the last couple of years, it has become possible to produce new types of vaccines, which consist of smaller entities of the disease-provoking micro organisms, such as proteins, peptides, and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The advantages of the new vaccines are improved efficacy, less side-effects and at the same time, preventing the risk of catching the disease.
In addition, domestic vaccine makers are looking to strengthen their operations—research and development (R&D) as well as marketing—to capitalise on opportunities emerging from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The pressures of rising costs for the global vaccine manufacturers has enabled the regional vaccine manufacturers from places like India to enter into the global vaccines market and has also provided them the platform to expand their presence.
Thus, biotech vaccines are starting to push back the conventional ones. The days of injecting a single shot to keep diseases, says cholera, tetanus, hepatitis or measles, are gone.
Instead, what we have in the market are combination vaccines that are easy to administer, cheap and extremely effective.
Also, researchers are going beyond the lab levels and now to space-based research. A recent report from BioSpace Technologies says that biotech research has taken a giant leap following the launch of a Nasa shuttle containing an experiment for development of a Salmonella vaccine. Researchers believe that the conditions in space, particularly the microgravity, provide a superior environment for the development of a Salmonella vaccine.
Quite clearly, the biggest factor driving the vaccine market is its potential to prevent deaths due to diseases. Every year, two million deaths are averted through immunisation, says a recent World Health Organisation (WHO) report, stressing with continued vaccine developments, four to five million annual deaths could be prevented by 2015.
After all, the statistics on vaccine preventable diseases like cholera, malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and typhoid are astounding. These diseases kill 1.9 million children annually. Around 2,000 million are infected by TB, another 2,400 million are affected by malaria and every day, there are 15,000 new AIDS infections.
At present, paediatric vaccines account for almost two-thirds of the global vaccine sales. Going forward, this segment will loose its share to the adult, therapeutic and influenza vaccine segments. After all, the battle against infectious diseases is far from over. We have witnessed a growing number of new diseases emerging in the past couple of years. Both the contemporary Sars and bird flu have been active all over the world. However, several challenges still remain, one of the biggest being the wide gap between the developed and the developing world in terms of accessibility and quality of vaccines.
According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, the developed markets in North America, Europe and Japan account for almost 80% of the global vaccine market. However, there is a set of emerging markets such as Africa, Asia (India and China in particular) and Latin America which are fast becoming the backbone for the growth of global vaccines market.
For the Indian vaccine makers, not only is there a real opportunity to tap these emerging markets, they could also ramp up their research and development (R&D) pipeline by attracting billions of dollars of funding that are going into developing vaccines. One of the ways they are doing this is by focusing their efforts on biotech vaccines (Read Genetically Modified!!), which vaccine makers claim to be superior to the conventional ones.
Traditionally, vaccines have consisted of weakened micro organisms. Suchitra Ella, joint managing director, Bharat Biotech, says, "Conventional bacterial vaccines for cholera and typhoid are derived from inactivated or killed cell organelles. This makes them more reactive thereby causing adverse reactions. The efficacy of these vaccines is also of shorter duration." Not surprising, conventional viral vaccines such as those for rabies has given place to a tissue culture-derived rabies vaccine of higher safety, purity and efficacy, she informs.
According to Ella, recombinant DNA technology makes it eminently possible to produce safe, pure and efficacious vaccines due to identification of the appropriate antigen or subunit of the organism. Hepatitis B vaccine is a classic example of a biotechnology-
"Conventional vaccines are sort of crude, whereas biotech vaccines produced by recombinant DNA technology are highly defined and more specific with batch-to-batch consistency and lesser side effects," says Varaprasad Reddy, managing director, Shantha Biotechnics. The company is working on Hepatitis B vaccine, DTP-HepB (tetravalent)
Yet another success story is emerging from Indian Immunologicals. The company is working on human vaccines in rDNA, hepatitis B, measles, DPT, tetanus, among others. Serum Institute of India, which supplies vaccines to over 137 countries across the world, has tied up with Gates Foundation and PATH for accessing testing technology for developing a pneumococcal vaccine.
Biotech vaccine makers are gung ho on joining hands with leading research institutes like National Institute of Cholera & Enteric Diseases, Kolkata, National Institute of Immunology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Central Drug Research Institute, among others, for developing new generation vaccines. ------------Posted by: Jagannath Chatterjee, Orissa State Head: India-Force, New Delhi, Loksatta, Hyderabad/Maharasht MANITHAM, Chennai. General Secretary: NOVAC (Network of Anti-Vaccination Activists) "It is now 30 years since I have been confining myself to the treatment of chronic diseases. During those 30 years I have run against so many histories of little children who had never seen a sick day until they were vaccinated and who, in the several years that have followed, have never seen a well day since. I couldn't put my finger on the disease they have. They just weren't strong. Their resistance was gone. They were perfectly well before they were vaccinated. They have never been well since. "---Dr. William Howard Hay |
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