Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Potent, Rapid And Cost-Effective Influenza Vaccines Made In E. Coli, Thomas Hofstaetter

Vaccine Technology III

The traditional influenza vaccine, trivalent inactivated virus (TIV) has been in use in the United States in one form or another since the 1940s. The system for production involves injecting influenza virus into embryonated hen’s eggs, harvesting the allantoic fluid containing the virus, inactivation with formalin, disruption of the virus with non-ionic detergent, zonal centrifugation to enrich for antigen and a second inactivation step. The recent appearance of the H1N1 swine virus has provided an opportunity to test the pandemic response system established over the past ten years. What we find is that the public health system seems to work …