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A Businesslike Approach
Zachari Iman works on a new tuberculosis vaccine at Aeras Global's Rockville facility. Aeras, with $108 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, estimates that a TB vaccine could be ready for large-scale use in 2012 or 2013.
(Photos By Katherine Frey -- The Washington Post)
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With little hope of profits, drug firms haven't been willing to take the vaccines that university scientists created and spend the enormous sums required to test them in humans, produce them at commercial scale and deliver them at low cost to the poor countries that need them. That is the problem Aeras has set out to solve.
"Before Aeras came along, these vaccines basically sat in a freezer," said Marcus Horwitz, a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles who invented one of the vaccines in Aeras's pipeline. "Aeras has provided an opportunity for these vaccines to be developed. That's a sea change."
Sadoff calculates that the earliest a vaccine can be readied for wide use might be 2012 or 2013. But it's necessary to build a production line now, he said, to make large amounts of vaccine for the tests, which will take place in human volunteers in Africa and Asia. If a new vaccine proves to work better than the 1921 product, the world could well need 150 million or more doses every year, a quantity the new Rockville facility could supply.
"If we don't do this now, we wouldn't have a facility ready and rolling when the time comes," Sadoff said.
Sadoff has built not just a drug factory but a research laboratory where Aeras scientists can tweak tuberculosis vaccines -- and possibly work on vaccines for other diseases. That actually worries Horwitz, who is eager to see a TB vaccine developed as rapidly as possible and is concerned that Aeras could lose focus. "I think it's reasonable to have a pipeline, but I think the pipeline should come from laboratories that specialize in making vaccines," he said.
Sadoff replied that Aeras would not let extraneous projects slow the main goal. "I agree with him -- we don't want to lose focus," Sadoff said.
Even if Aeras develops a vaccine, there's no guarantee that governments and charities in the wealthy countries will spend the money needed to get it to poor people. But, with Gates backing, the once-stagnant field of TB research is hopping, leading to optimism in many quarters.
"It would have been unheard of 10 years ago to have a pipeline" of tuberculosis vaccines, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which has funded much of the academic research Aeras is poised to exploit. "All of a sudden there's a keen interest in diseases that we knew about, we kind of accepted as being terrible, but the developed world didn't feel we needed to do anything about."
