Investors bid up Novavax shares on news of vaccine success

Shares of Novavax shot up this morning after the company announced that its experimental vaccine for avian flu protected animals. Investors bid up Novavax shares by 38 percent after learning from a study in Vaccine that the Novavax drug evidently worked by eliciting an immune response without infecting cells. Researchers are studying Novavax technology, which requires shorter lead times than traditional methods for developing vaccines.

"Our VLP technology, based on a scalable process with short production lead times, offers an attractive alternative to the existing egg-dependent and the newer cell-based methods for the manufacture of influenza vaccine and other urgently needed vaccines. These advantages address the challenge of producing large quantities of a pandemic flu vaccine within a short time frame," said Rahul Singhvi, president and CEO of Novavax.

- read this AP story for more