With the help of a $220 million federal government grant, Novartis announced it will build a $600 million flu-vaccine manufacturing facility in North Carolina. Construction will begin in 2007 and the plant will be ready for vaccine production for the 2012 flu season. Novartis's decision to construct a new plant is an effort to update older manufacturing facilities that have had production problems in recent years. Rather than making the vaccine from chicken eggs, production at the new facility will obtain the vaccines using cell-culture technologies. It's a method that is quicker and more reliable to the traditional approach, though the FDA has yet to approved the method for flu vaccines. Novartis will pump out an estimated 50 million doses of the vaccine from the new plant.
The North Carolina facility will also be equipped to produce up to 150 million avian flu vaccines in the event of a pandemic. In early May, five pharmaceutical companies--MedImmune, DynPort Vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Solvay Pharmaceuticals--won a combined $1 billion dollars worth of government contracts in the race to develop new technology to make flu vaccines needed to combat a human pandemic. Interestingly, the project's $600 million price tag is $200 million more than CEO Daniel Vasella had projected May.
- read this San Francisco Chronicle article
- check out this The Washington Post report for background on the government contract