(C) Our World in Data
This story was originally published by Our World in Data and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Vaccines enjoy a healthy return [1]

['Author.Fullname', 'Debora Mackenzie']

Date: 2022-11 

Companies are making vaccines for diseases in the developing world (Image: Rolex Delapena/Corbis)

See our interactive graphic: “What’s in the pipeline?“

IN THE 1967 film The Graduate, the young hero played by Dustin Hoffman gets a one-word piece of careers advice: “plastics”. In 2011, that word could well be “vaccines”.

While the rest of the pharmaceutical sector struggles to keep afloat as expiring patents send profits plummeting, the vaccine industry has become remarkably buoyant. According to a recent report by medical market analysts Kalorama Information, the vaccine market grew an impressive 14 per cent between 2009 and 2010, despite the economic downturn, and growth is predicted to continue. Such news offers a ray of hope for those wanting to work in pharmaceuticals but who are put off by the doom and gloom of the rest of the sector.

Advertisement

Yet just a few years ago, vaccines were the unprofitable runt of the pharmaceutical family, primarily due to their market. People must buy blood pressure or asthma drugs for years, but only one or a few doses of a vaccine in their lives, so sales are low. In addition, vaccines are routinely bought by public health agencies at a low price. Consequently, so many companies had abandoned the production of vaccines by 2003 that the US experienced shortages of most childhood vaccines.

Two factors have turned the industry around. One is an increasing demand for vaccines in developing countries. This is partly due to greater prosperity in the growing economies of China and India but also because vaccination is being vigorously promoted by various organisations as a route to economic development. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), which campaigns for greater access to vaccines in developing countries, has created a booming market for vaccines in developing nations partly by persuading governments to pool resources and make advance purchase commitments. This helps bring prices to an affordable level for developing countries while still making it profitable for the manufacturers. As a result, vaccine makers are now working on widespread, previously neglected diseases, such as malaria.

Research is also driving the boom in vaccines, bringing a better understanding of pathogens and immune reactions to them, as well as diversifying the jobs available in this area. Besides immunologists or virologists, “there are many kinds of scientists entering the field who weren’t there before”, says Rino Rappuoli, head of global vaccines research for Novartis in Siena, Italy.

The way forward, Rappuoli says, is to understand immune responses in great detail, and to use that knowledge to design vaccines that elicit exactly the right response. To do this, vaccine trials now use microarrays of DNA sequences to track which genes get turned on or off in response to a vaccine. “This generates data sets that are too big for one human mind to comprehend,” says Rappuoli. Vaccine companies therefore need systems biologists and mathematicians to manage and analyse the data. They also need statisticians to design more efficient clinical trials, structural biologists to discover what features of molecules elicit what immunity, and chemists to develop adjuvants, the chemical agents that boost the immune reaction to a vaccine. Chemical process managers are also welcome in an industry where flawless production is crucial, and engineers are needed to design new vaccination devices.

Understanding the basics of immune systems, Rappuoli feels, will achieve one of the field’s biggest ambitions: vaccines to cure cancer. Hopes for such vaccines were high in the 1990s but only one product has ever been approved. Nonetheless, there is renewed interest in using vaccines to treat disease as well as prevent it. Most work focuses on cancer, HIV and diabetes. There is already a vaccine to prevent infection by the HPV virus that causes cervical cancer, but the Dutch firm Crucell is working on one that will reverse the infection once it has taken hold.

Land of the giants

The vaccine business is unusually concentrated, with 80 per cent of vaccines supplied by just five big companies: Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Pfizer and Novartis (see our interactive graphic “What’s in the pipeline?“). With most of these firms or their vaccine subsidiaries based in Europe, this makes the continent home to 90 per cent of global vaccine production and nearly half of its R&D (Drug Development and Delivery, vol 11, p 26).

However, to gain flexibility – and spread risk – the big firms increasingly outsource much R&D to smaller companies. This means jobs are available in a wide range of companies, not just the giants. Bear in mind that small companies can be vulnerable to acquisitions, and this can complicate career paths as well as cause staffing problems with integration and redeployment. Crucell was acquired this year by Johnson & Johnson, allowing the bigger company to get back into the vaccines market.

Hanneke Schuitemaker, senior vice-president for vaccine research at Crucell, moved there a year ago from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “I wanted something bigger than my academic work that would be of more immediate benefit to the world.”

Animals need jabs too As increasing global demand for meat boosts numbers and density of livestock, the market for animal vaccines is predicted to grow from $4 billion in 2009 to $5.6 billion in 2015, according to a report from analysts BCC Research. And animals in developing countries have their equivalent of GAVI in GALVmed, which promotes animal vaccines. There are other reasons for an increase in demand. “People care more about food quality,” says Andrew Potter of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organisation (VIDO) at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “And they hated the mass slaughter of the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 in the UK,” he adds, referring to the policy used instead of vaccines to control the disease. Since then the European Union has authorised more widespread use of foot and mouth vaccines and there is increasing pressure for it to permit routine control with “marker” vaccines that allow vets to distinguish between infected and vaccinated animals, essential for disease surveillance. David Asper, who last year moved from VIDO to Pfizer to work on vaccines for farmed fish, says vaccines are “the green way to go. It means livestock are healthier and need fewer medicines to treat disease.”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20877-vaccines-enjoy-a-healthy-return/

Published and (C) by Our World in Data
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/ourworldindata/