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First UK Trials for Avian Flu Vaccine Proposed

Plans for clinical trials to test the viability of a vaccine to protect against an avian flu pandemic have been submitted to the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

If successful, UK company PowderMed, which develops vaccines for viral diseases and cancers, will conduct their H5N1 vaccine trials at a clinical research unit in London.

They would be the first in-man trials to examine the ability of a vaccine based upon the Vietnam H5N1 avian influenza strain to protect against a potential pandemic.

PowderMed's vaccine is a needle-free injection device which fires gold particles coated with DNA – encoding genes specific to the flu strain – at supersonic speed into the immune cells of the skin.

Previous trials conducted in the US using bird flu strains in a vaccine had 100 per cent protection in various experimental models.

Dr Beadle, PowderMed's chief medical officer, said that the vaccine could play 'a very important role' in the event of a future avian flu pandemic.

The company's chief executive, Dr Clive Dix, added: 'DNA vaccines have a huge potential to limit the burden of disease and can be manufactured very rapidly, in large amounts: enough to vaccinate the whole of the UK population twice over (prime and boost) requires just one kg of DNA and can be manufactured and available in just three months from the point a strain is identified.'

Although humans can only currently catch bird flu from infected animals and not from other humans, experts fear that the virus could mutate and cause a global pandemic.

Since the virus first starting killing Asian poultry in 2003, bird flu has resulted in the deaths of at least 131 people worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Source:http://news.monstersandcritics.com